


falco peregrinus pealei (wandering falcon)

by Wolf2407



Series: Starhawk (and Sons) et al. [1]
Category: Guardians of the Galaxy (Comics), Guardians of the Galaxy (Movies), Guardians of the Galaxy - All Media Types
Genre: Back in the Good OId Days, Conlanging, F/F, F/M, Families of Choice, Fix-It, Found Families, Gen, M/M, Multi, Other, Ravager Dynamics, Ravager Politics, The Original Team, Worldbuilding, Young Yondu, and his mama, baby kraglin, but ho boy are you gonna suffer on the way there, eventually, slavery and the consequences thereof, there'll eventually be a happy ending too, we drove our M-Ships AROUND black holes BOTH ways and we were GRATEFUL, young everybody really
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-09-14
Updated: 2017-12-25
Packaged: 2018-12-29 16:32:30
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 5
Words: 34,069
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12088932
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Wolf2407/pseuds/Wolf2407
Summary: alternatively titled "The Falcon and the Sea"What do you have left, when everything else has been taken away? What do you do?You take back what was stolen and then you give it away and lose it all again, that's what.An examination of the relationship between Aleta, Yondu and Stakar, from beginning to end. From Aleta's perspective.





	1. First Contact

**Author's Note:**

> The peregrine falcon is a large falcon, living on every continent except Antarctica. It is the fastest known mammal, and has been known to travel over 25,000 kilometers (15,000 miles) a year.
> 
> The Peale's peregrine, a subspecies, is known for having an especially foul temperament, and being exceptionally aggressive. In the wild, it fights bald eagles for food.

The first time they meet, she’s stalking around the base of her M-ship like a hungry wolf, the forest green of the _Remora_ shining in the dim red-orange light filtering through the clouds. The _Remora’s_ sisters from the _Sharpwing_ are clustered here and there around the field, intermixed with their cousins from the _Valkyrie._ The biggest M-ship on the field, of course, sits next to the _Remora,_ their wings a hairsbreadth from touching, like two lovers on a Xandarian serial separated by a glass wall.  
  
The _Remora_ didn’t look _that_ bad next to the _Siren,_ she supposed, flipping over a corpse, sorting out the ones that belonged to them, the ones that didn’t, helping wherever she was needed. As long as she performed- and by the stars, did the _Remora_ ever- it didn’t matter. Besides, she was always the prettiest ship in every port that the _Siren_ wasn’t also in.  
  
More often than she wanted to see, another M-ship would take off from the field, with another circling back to take its place, falling out of the sky like a soaring eagle and touching down, where more bodies would be loaded, injured men whisked away to the medbays on the _Sharpwing_ and the _Valkyrie._ It didn’t particularly matter who went where at the moment; they could exchange living crew as soon as this was all settled out, and the ashes all went to the same place anyway.  
  
None of this had needed to happen anyway, she thought furiously, nearly seeing red. If they’d been more careful, if they’d just looked over their shoulders more and ahead less, hadn’t been quite so cocky to think nobody would attack the _two fucking flagships of the entire Ravager Armada,_ some of this could have been stopped.  
  
It wasn’t the fighting that had bothered her, not really. Even though every body wearing a green jacket that had to be carried or dragged twisted at her gut, it would have been a good, honorable death otherwise. No, it was the battle slaves that rattled her nerves, the _children_ who’d been reduced to bloody ruins just like the rest of them.  
  
_War is hell._  
  
“Captain Ogord, ma’am!” a voice behind her called, and a smile came to her face easily as she turned.  
  
“You’re gonna have to be more specific than that,” she said, tamping down the sadness and horror and grief and _anger_ to take on a light, teasing tone for her first mate.  
  
“Captain _Aleta_ doesn’t have the same ring to it, _”_ Caraginei replied, coming to a stop in front of her. “But I suppose it’ll have to do. I came to tell you that Sepharis and a few of the others are wanting your leave to be going back to the _Sharpwing_ and staying there to help with the wounded, ma’am. The medics are getting swamped, and there’s starting to be a shortage of space, too.”  
  
“Give Sepharis the all-clear, then. Why didn’t they just comm me?”  
  
“With all due respect, ma’am, they’ve been trying.”  
  
Aleta looked down at her wrist, saw the wrist-link had been shattered to pieces somewhere in the fighting. She waved her arm in front of Cara’s face, letting her see.  
  
“I’m going to stay down here ‘til I’m sure we’ve gotten everybody. Then I’ll probably head to the _Valkyrie,_ check on how many of ours went there.”  
  
“Yes-ma’am.”  
  
“Cara,” Aleta said, catching her first mate’s arm as she turned to go back to her work. “Are there any estimates yet, on how many we lost?”  
  
Cara didn’t show any emotion at _all_ when she was working. Sometimes it was nice, and sometimes it was unsettling and just made Aleta more nervous, like now.  
  
“All-together, or each crew individually, ma’am?”  
  
She swallowed the lump in her throat. “Both.”  
  
“All together, I think the last count was something like ninety-four, and that was half an hour ago,” Cara recited. “I’ve personally picked up eight more, so I’d give a rough number of maybe a hundred and fifty or two hundred lost outright, maybe three, and maybe another fifty or a hundred will succumb to their wounds. I can’t give good numbers for each crew yet.”  
  
Aleta took a deep breath, lifted her chin, and pressed her fist to her heart, once and again. “They will be remembered with us.”  
  
Sadness flashed in Cara’s eyes, just for a moment, before she mirrored Aleta’s pose and thumped her fist above her heart twice. “Yes, Captain. They will be remembered with us.”  
  
It's later, much later, when she’s dragged too many friends up the walkway of an M-ship and her coat’s turning brown and grey with dried blood and her muscles shaking with emotion and fatigue that she sees Stakar, bent over with a heaviness to his gait, and her heart stops.  
  
It starts back up again when she sees that it’s just because he’s carrying something- some _one-_ tucked under his shoulder, their strides awkwardly unmatched.  
  
A golden light at her side gets her attention; Krugarr, in all his strange, Eldritch-horror wonder, flashes a pair of mandalas at her- a hand waving in a go-away sort of manner, and another flashing a thumbs up. He’d arrived a few hours ago with Mainframe, bringing more living bodies to help deal with the dead ones. Cara’s early estimate was starting to look awfully small.  
  
“You sure?” Aleta asks, the message of _go to him, it’ll be fine here_ ringing across loud and clear.  
  
Krugarr nods, the shoo-hand mandala gets brighter, and Aleta runs.  
  
Stakar’s most of the way up the loading ramp of the _Siren_ by the time she reaches the foot of it. He’s silhouetted against the light streaming out from the interior of the ship, biting into the darkness gathering outside, and she watches one of his crew come up and relieve him of whomever he’d been carrying, the soft murmurs of the words said just on the far side of legibility.  
  
Even though she hasn’t made a sound, hadn’t made any sign at all of her presence, he turns to her. For a moment, they hold eye contact, so many unspoken things between them that it gives more information than most conversations. Eventually, he holds out a hand to her.  
  
She walks up the loading ramp, and like two fatally orbiting bodies, they pull each other into an embrace. Her wedding band clinks on a buckle on his shoulder, the half-dried blood on their jackets sticks together, but none of that matters now. She nuzzles the spot where his neck and shoulder join, breathing in his scent.  
  
For a long time, they don’t say anything. There’s nothing that needs to be said.  
  
“Who was that?” she asks after an indeterminate amount of time, when her muscles don’t quake and her mind is settled. “I don’t remember anyone on either of our crews with an implant like that, and he wasn’t wearing any colors.”  
  
They still haven’t moved; she’s addressing his collarbone, and similarly, when he responds, his breath ruffles her hair.  
  
“That’s ‘cause he’s not on either of our crews. He was a Kree battle slave that made it through the fighting.” _Was._ “I offered him a spot on my ship. He’s got nowhere else to go, ‘Leta, he _begged me_ to kill him and leave him there. I couldn’t do it.”  
  
Aleta nodded, the edge of the collar on his jacket rubbing her cheek, and drew some solace from the fact she hadn’t been the only one who’d been fucked up by what they’d faced out there.  
  
She pulls away from him, taking his hand. “Let’s go wash the day off,” she suggests softly, tugging him towards the corridor that leads to his quarters. She knows the _Siren_ nearly as well as she knows the _Remora,_ and she knows her husband even better than she knows her ship.  
  
He smiles at her sadly, and follows her.  
  
_*_  
  
Later, after the water had warmed her skin, his hands worked the tension from her muscles, and the rest of him started to work the pain out of her soul, his fingers trail through her hair as her head rests on his chest, listening to the steadfast sound of his heartbeat. Her leg is wrapped around one of his, his other arm around her shoulders, their bodies pressed together trying to fill the freshly-irritated ragged hole where children had once been.  
  
Seeing the battle-slaves had been too vivid of a reminder of what small, broken bodies looked like.  
  
  
_**_  
  
  
She meets him again the next morning, when she’s still rebuilding the walls that hold her back from falling into a million pieces. They’re in the mess hall, still pressed close enough together that she can feel Stakar’s breathing through their jackets, freshly cleaned. They have the table to themselves; the morning shift is just filtering in, the night shift is filtering out, and both of them give their captain and his wife their bubble of privacy. Here and there, Aleta catches one of her green jackets in the crowd, and a little bit of weight lifts off of her heart.  
  
All of them are giving them their space, that is, except the new boy. He might not properly _be_ a boy, maybe more of a man, it’s awfully hard to tell with malnutrition cases. Something inside her softens for him anyway.  
  
He sits down across from them, head cast down, the light glittering over the cracks in his implant.  
  
“Aren’t you hungry, boy?” Stakar asks, his own plate of food hardly touched in favor of maintaining skin contact with Aleta.  
  
“No, sir,” the boy answers quietly.  
  
“What’s your name?” Aleta asks in her softest voice, the one she uses on the children she meets planetside, the voice that had cooed reassurances to her own.  
  
“Seven-nine-one-four-four-six-seven-two,” the boy answers, the numbers rattled off with the rote precision of endless practice.  
  
“Did you have a name before?” Aleta presses gently, careful, because the pain is obvious in this boy’s shoulders, in what she can see of his eyes, of how his hands clench in his lap, not to mention the gauze here and there covering wounds. “Something you were called before you had a number?”  
  
Her stomach twists at how many digits there were in his designation. The numbers were assigned consecutively, and sometimes preceded by a location prefix. No location prefix meant a number assigned directly on Hala’s surface. Which meant seventy-nine million slaves had gone through the branding stations _just on Hala_ before this boy.  
  
The boy bites his tongue in concentration. “This one’s family name was Udonta,” he says slowly, with the tone of someone whose thoughts are a million light-years away. Her translator chip tingles, wrestling with the pronouns of Lesser Kree-Lar. “This one’s given name, was… Yondu.” She had a vague feeling he’d made it up. That was fine.  
  
_Does he even have words for ‘me’ and ‘I’?_  
  
“Do you know what clan, what tribe you’re from?” Stakar queried, shifting against her; she leaned into his warmth, not quite ready to let go yet.  
  
“This one does not know,” Yondu says, his eyes still on the floor.  
  
“Where’s home?” Aleta asks, and starts to feel intrusive.  
  
“This one does not have one.”  
  
Aleta pushed her plate towards him- the food was actually pretty decent today, but she wasn’t hungry. The boy inhaled sharply and watched her hand get closer to him, tensing up and only relaxing when she withdrew.  
  
“Go ahead, eat it, it’s not poisoned,” she says, and tries to pull herself away from the tender-hearted Aleta Ogord, husband of Stakar and mother of dead children, tries to wrap herself back in the mantle of _Captain,_ but it doesn’t quite reach, and her heart reaches out to this boy, so lost, so alone. “Promise. That’s not how we do things here.”  
  
The boy- _Yondu-_ looks at her, looks at the food, and she can see it run through his head, the final decision of _fuck it if they’re gonna kill me they’ll kill me anyway if this don’t work_ , and smiles to herself as he digs in like a starving dog.  
  
“I know someone who could help you find out about your home, if you want,” Aleta says, and tried to think about how she’d school Mainframe into not scaring the boy right out of his skin. “And I’m sure one of our engineers can help fix your implant.” _That looks like it hurts like hell._  
  
The boy hesitates. “This one is grateful, and is looking forward to it.”  
  
 “You’re going to be needing some new clothes, too,” Stakar added. “You must be cold.”  
  
“No, sir,” Yondu said, even as Aleta spotted his fingers trembling.  
  
“And you’ll need something heartier to wear anyway, since what you’ve got won’t be of much use in a fight.”  
  
“I assure you, sir, that it will not be an issue-“  
  
“You need proper gear, boy,” Stakar cut in, and Yondu flinched slightly. “And you’re part of my crew now. You should look the part.”  
  
“I might want him for myself,” Aleta whispered in his ear, the hint of a smile on her lips. “I think he’d look good in green.  
  
“It was a joke,” she added hastily when the boy glanced at her, clearly unsettled as he finished the food. _And made in poor taste._ “Come on, let’s get you down to engineering.” The _Siren_ couldn’t hope to compare to the _Valkyrie_ or _Sharpwing_ in terms of breadth of supplies and manpower available, but she _was_ big enough to have a small engineering crew with her on flights. Aleta stood, her hand lingering on Stakar’s shoulder as she disentangled herself from the table. “You coming with?” she asked quietly as the boy made to follow.  
  
“I should go check in with Martinex and Charlie, make sure everything’s still alright,” he replied. “Once I’m done with that, I’ll join you.”  
  
She nodded, gave his shoulder a last squeeze, and didn’t want to admit how hard it was to pull her hand away, but she did it anyway and felt his eyes on her as she crossed the mess hall. When she turned into a corridor that would lead down into the belly of the ship, her only company now was the boy, silent as a shadow and nearly as precise in the distance at which he followed her.  
  
“This is an M-ship,” she said by way of explanation, gesturing a hand to indicate the walls, the ceiling, the _Siren_ as a whole. “This specific one is called the _Siren,_ although I imagine you didn’t see her too well in the dark last night. She belongs to Stakar. I have my own, and so do many of the crew.” _You will too someday._ “They’re good for short and medium-range travel, planetside work, that type of thing. Fast and agile, and excellent for fighting, but their armor isn’t as strong as some of the heavier ships.” Yondu didn’t say anything, or make a sound, but she could feel the intensity of how he was absorbing her words. “They can have the same reactor-traditional-fuel combo the other ships do. Some just run on traditional fuel, those are usually the smaller ships. As M-ships go, the _Siren_ is exceptionally large., but the basic idea is the same through almost all M-ships.” _Except the crazy shit Mainframe cooked up,_ Aleta thought to herself, and wondered if those things even qualified as M-ships anymore. And Krugarr’s ships- both his main warship and his auxiliaries- were… well… _unique._  
  
“None of that’s really _crucial_ to know right now,” she reassured him. “Once you see them in action, it makes more sense.” _It’ll be good to know for when you get one of your own._  
  
She looked back at him; he seemed rather thoughtful at the moment. She had a good feeling about this one; he’d do well, if he managed to acclimatize to his new home.  
  
Yondu Udonta, unsurprisingly, was a man of very few words. He followed her down the hallway in near-complete silence, maintaining an exact distance from her back, his eyes on the ground in front of him. It was a pattern beaten into him by the Kree, she knew- she’d seen the exact same behavior before from when they saw mid-level Pureborn planetside. She had half a mind to tell him to come walk alongside her.  
  
She didn’t push it, though.  
  
When she walked through the doorway of the mech-shop, she first got a cursory look, then enjoyed the double-take as one of the techs stood from bending over his project- a disassembled plasma rifle, maybe?- and thumped his chest with his fist.  
  
“Captain Aleta, ma’am!” he called out, and she dipped her head in recognition. “Is there something wrong?”  
  
Usually, if the captain came down to engineering and it wasn’t for a standard inspection, it meant something was or was about to be _spectacularly_ fucked up.  
  
“At ease,” she said, and the smile came easy as she pulled her walls back up, settled into command, _Captain Aleta_ pushing aside the grieving mother. “Our new crewman here-“ she stepped aside, and gestured to Yondu- “came on last night, and has some damage to his implant. I was wondering if you could fix it here, or if he’d have to wait until he goes to the _Valkyrie.”_  
  
Direct captain’s orders came ahead of standard weapons repairs. The tech walked over, the boy bowing his head so that the implant could be inspected more closely.  
  
“What happened to it?” the tech asked, tracing a finger over the cracks that riddled the top pane of glass.  
  
“A blaster hit,” Yondu said quietly. “It glows when this one uses the arrow. It stands out on the battlefield, and it makes a distinct target. An Overseer also fell on this one, and this one hit his head on a rock, as well, which may have worsened the damage.”  
  
Being around Ravagers would do the boy some good. The properness of his grammar was making her skin itch. What kind of a war were the Kree fighting if they had time to sit around and make their slaves say twenty words where four would suffice?  
  
“I see,” the tech said, and tapped a finger against the glass; he couldn’t see how the boy’s lip twitched when he did. “Do you know what material it’s made of?”  
  
“No, sir.”  
  
“Hmm.” He tapped his finger on the implant again, and Yondu actually grimaced this time. “Seems like fairly standard electro-conductive glass. I think I have just the thing.” He crossed the room, and started rifling through one of the dozens of cabinets along the walls, each one as tall as a man- a normal man, not Charlie-sized. The room was just a small chamber tucked in the belly of the _Siren_ for emergency repairs or small-scale things; one hallway, the one they’d come through, led into this little workshop, and another led out, down towards the engines. In between were work stations, tables burdened with projects half-done as the rest of the techs went and tended the rest of the ship, getting her ready to return to the _Valkyrie._  
  
“Here we go!” the tech said happily, pulling out a small plate of glass. “It’s thicker than what you have now, so it’ll stand up to getting banged around better. Sit down. If I take that top plate off, I can make a copy of it.”  
  
Aleta leaned back against the wall, watched the boy’s hands clench into tight fists as he went to the table the tech gestured at, and sat and lowered his head. It was _palpable_ how much he hated taking his eyes off of people.  
  
The tech, at least, was fast; in nearly no time at all he’d done what he needed to do, and she saw Yondu shiver as the top plate was removed, revealing a thick nest of wires that seemed to go uncomfortably deep into the boy’s head. The tech hustled over to a different workbench, firing up a torch and heating the new plate to mold it to the shape of the old.  
  
“How much of that can you feel?” Aleta asked.  
  
“The entirety of it, ma’am,” the boy said, his fists clenched tightly around the edge of the table. “The glass feels in the same way skin does.”  
  
She blinked, swallowed a lump in her throat. _I’m sorry,_ she wanted to say, but knew her pity wouldn’t be appreciated.  
  
She saw the tech tap the new plate with his finger, testing the temperature, and seeming satisfied, he picked it up, walked over, and tested the fit.  
  
“Perfect,” the tech declared with the pomposity of engineers who would brag about a well-done job for months. “I’ll cold-solder it on, and then you’ll be good as new.”  
  
New, Aleta suspected, was not having the implant in the first place.  
  
The moment the tech finished joining the two pieces, the implant flashed bright red, then settled into a dull glow. The boy’s shoulders slumped, and there was far less tension in his face when he straightened as the tech pulled away. He ran his hand over the glass, and let out his breath.  
  
“This one is grateful,” Yondu murmured, near-wonder.  
  
“So what were you saying about an arrow?” the tech wondered idly, filing away the various bits and pieces he’d been using.  
  
Yondu looked back at her- for approval? _Her?_  
  
She nodded, even though it wasn’t her place.  
  
The boy produced a golden arrow, holding it out for inspection, and then-  
  
-he whistled, and the arrow floated above his hand, shimmering red in unison with the implant. A few soft notes had it lazily flying about the room, the tech watching it and looking like a child who’d just seen their first extraterrestrial.  
  
A sharp, shrill tone had it snap into a turn faster than Aleta’s eyes could track; she flinched, and the arrow left a red trail in front of her as it returned to the boy’s hand.  
  
“What can you do with that?” the tech wondered, starry-eyed.  
  
“This one has sent it through the hull of a ship before, and it returned no worse for wear.”  
  
The tech sat back, and Aleta decided to intervene.  
  
“Thank you for your work,” she told the tech, who nodded in acknowledgement. “I have other duties I must attend to. With me, Udonta,” she called as she turned into the hallway.  
  
This time she heard him trotting to catch up with her. “This one is grateful for this, and in your debt,” he said, slowing to a walk just behind her. His voice was a _lot_ lighter now, and she wondered just how much the implant had been hurting before.  
  
“You’re welcome,” Aleta said simply. “Don’t be afraid to go and ask the engineers for help with whatever issues you have, it’s what we pay them to do.”  
  
“Understood, ma’am,” the boy replied.  
  
“And I _mean_ it,” she insisted, walking much faster on the way back than on the way down. The boy didn’t seem to have any trouble keeping up. “They’ll spend three days reassembling a blaster if you let them. It’s good to give them a workout once in awhile.”  
  
“Yes, ma’am.”  
  
_*_  
  
She leads him down the _Siren’s_ loading ramp, the bodies still littering the field, but less of them than yesterday. She notices, now, when on their way to the last place she saw Krugarr she passes a Kree with a tenth-credit-coin-sized hole clean through his head, and smiles.  
  
Kree don’t collect the bodies of the dead.  
  
Nobody would have ever known.  
  
_Good on you._  
  
“Excuse-me, ma’am,” Yondu says behind her, and she hums. “This one has a question.”  
  
“Ask it, then.”  
  
“Why are the bodies being collected?”  
  
There’s a nervous silence, like he expects her to snap at him. She doesn’t.  
  
“Ravagers have funerals for their dead,” she explains, picking a path around the bodies, aggressively ignoring the smaller bodies. Most of the M-ships are gone now; the night shift had gotten nearly all of the casualties off-planet. “We honor them with a ceremony, and for the ceremony, you need the body. I expect you’ll find out what it looks like soon enough.”  
  
“Yes, ma’am,” he replies.  
  
He’s a good deal more talkative now that his implant’s fixed, Aleta thinks, and shouts to Cara’s familiar silhouette.  
  
Her first mate whips to attention, salutes, and starts towards them.  
  
“Did you stay out here all night?” Aleta asks as soon as they’re within not-shouting distance of each other.  
  
“Yes, cap’n,” Cara pants, and looks exhausted, her courtesies faded. “Cap’n Krugarr managed the crew well in your place. I missed going back to the _Sharpwing_ with the evening shift, a section of the night shift came down to finish the job. By your leave, ma’am, I’d like to take the _Ascarnion_ back to the _Sharpwing.”_ The _Ascarnion_ was Caraginei’s personal M-ship, silver and green with black stripes along the body and wings.  
  
“Permission granted,” Aleta said. “Go get some sleep. Could you point me towards Krugarr, before you do?”  
  
Cara waved a hand. “Does _he_ ever sleep, ma’am?”  
  
“Honestly, Cara, I’ve never even seen him eat.”  
  
She laughed at that, saluted again, and departed.  
  
It didn’t take them long to find Krugarr, seeing as there was only one ten-foot-tall sentient snake-fish-man she knew. He heard her much before he acknowledged her, she was sure, but he waited until she was within comfortable speaking distance before turning around and flashing her a mandala of a hand waving hello.  
  
Yondu, the poor boy, nearly jumped out of his skin.  
  
Aleta chuckled to herself. “Thanks for watching them for me,” she murmured, and smiled genuinely at him. He’d always seen through her guises anyway. “I assume they were easy on you?”  
  
Krugarr nodded at that, and she felt satisfied; a good crew was one that operated without a captain at all.  
  
“This is Yondu Udonta,” she said, gesturing to the boy, who looked as close to frightened as she’d seen him yet. “He’s the newest member of Stakar’s crew. Yondu, this is Krugarr, captain of the…”  
  
She hesitated. Pursed her lips.  
  
_Shit._  
  
Did Krugarr’s ship even _have_ a name? He couldn’t speak to name it, and she always just called it _Krugarr’s Ship…_  
  
“A Ravager captain of his own ship, which has no name,” she recovered, and he flashed her a mandala of a laughing face. “He’s a Lem, an _exceptionally_ skilled sorcerer. As you can see, he’s biologically incapable of speaking, so he communicates through the mandalas.”  
  
“It is this one’s gift to have met you,” Yondu said, bowing his head, keeping his eyes on the ground.  
  
Krugarr looked at Yondu, then looked back to her, flashing an image of Mainframe’s face, then crossing his wrists. _Watch out for Mainframe._  
  
“Oh, don’t I know it, she’ll just overwhelm him,” Aleta sighed, but the corners of her mouth lifted. “She’s a bit much for _me_ even at the best of times. Are you almost done down here?”  
  
A thumbs-up, a hand gathering sand-grains off the ground, a string tied in a knot. _Yes, almost done, just taking care of a few little things and tying up some loose ends._  
  
“That’s good, then. Do you think you’ll be staying around for awhile?”  
  
The thumbs-up again, almost painfully bright.  
  
“I’ll see you up on the _Valkyrie,_ then,” she promised, and gave him a parting smile.  
  
_*_  
  
She leads the boy up the loading ramp of the _Remora,_ tracing her fingers along the wall as she entered, closing her eyes and breathing in the scent of light-duty machine grease, polishing compounds, warm metal, _home._  
  
“This is the _Remora,”_ she told Yondu, pressing the button to close the loading bay once he was on board. “She’s my personal M-ship. Not _quite_ as nice as the _Siren_ , but, well…”  
  
“It is this one’s honor,” Yondu said quietly, his eyes cast to the ceiling.  
  
Aleta smiled again at that, absentmindedly trailing her fingers along the wall as she made her way through the ship. The _Siren_ and the _Remora_ were the two biggest M-ships in the entire Armada; the _Remora_ only took second place because a few of her components were a few years behind the _Siren’s._  
  
It was nothing operationally crucial, of course, and if Aleta was honest, in some places _newer wasn’t necessarily better,_ but it was a fun game to play. One of these days she’d get her hands on one of those new nav-screens from Bhakatta IX, the nice ones that gave you the five-day forecast, current weather and geological state of your landing site. Then, of course, Stakar would have to find something _nicer,_ and so on, and so forth.  
  
She dropped into the captain’s chair, pulled up the chairside comm-link.  
  
“Hello,” she said. “Sorry, did I mention? My wrist-comm got broken yesterday.”  
  
Stakar sighed. “You went to engineering, and didn’t get it fixed.”  
  
“Forgot,” she said honestly, and initiated the _Remora’s_ startup procedures.  
  
“I see you haven’t made it to Chakanna for a new ‘link system yet. I heard the neighboring planet makes a nice navigation system, too-“  
  
“Oh, hush,” Aleta cut in, and let the brief rumble of the _Remora’s_ engines smother his comeback before they balanced out, the comm-system balanced out, and the noise cancellation kicked in. “This gear just came out two years ago!”  
  
“You know how investing in electronics goes, ‘Leta.”  
  
She rolled her eyes. _“Anyway,_ I _originally_ called to say that I’m going to head back to the _Valkyrie._ Krugarr’s nearly done down here too, and the night shift finished their work nicely. I’ve still got the new guy with me, don’t worry,” she added, reaching over to calibrate the nav-system to their current location. _The ones from Bhakatta self-calibrate,_ a little voice in the back of her head said. “Might play around a little bit on the way up, show the kid what an M-ship can do.”  
  
Stakar was doing better, too, she noted, and felt relieved. His eyes were brighter, full of humor.  
  
“Don’t scare him too much, ‘Leta. I haven’t even had a chance to put my colors on him yet.”  
  
“Hush,” she told him, but her eyes were laughing as she cut off the connection, then gestured at the copilot’s seat. “Go ahead, sit.”  
  
The boy balked. “Are you-“ he swallowed, worked his jaw- “-ma’am, are you sure? This one does not have piloting experience.”  
  
“Then you’ll get some,” she replied. “Now sit in the chair and watch me.”  
  
An order was much easier for him to deal with than a choice. He sat, and watched.  
  
She placed her hand on the lever in the arm of her chair, waited for him to mirror her. “This is the throttle,” she explained. “It controls your speed. First thing you do when things get fucked, _slow down._ Or speed up and get out of there.”  
  
“This one understands, ma’am.”  
  
“This one.” She laid a hand on the joystick on the other armrest. “It controls turning, and how high or low you are. It’s much more sensitive than you’d think, it only takes a little bit. Same with the throttle.”  
  
“This one understands, ma’am,” he murmured, but his eyes looked utterly enchanted. The noise-cancelling had fully cut out now that the call was over, letting the engines’ song reverberate up to the cockpit.  
  
“It’s important to _listen to your engines,”_ she told him, and nudged her throttle-lever forward just a hair, and the _Remora_ absolutely _purred._ “Often the sound will be your first indicator that something’s wrong. It could be something as simple as a joint needs greasing, or your reactor could be melting down.”  
  
“This one understands,” he said again, and closed his eyes to hear it.  
  
“You can feel it through the chair, too, even when the noise-cancelling’s on.” She flicked a handful of overhead switches, tossed off a beacon signal to the _Valkyrie_ of the _Remora’s_ callsign, along with _incoming, taking my time on the way._  
  
“For takeoff, coax her up into it, nice and easy,” she narrated as she eased forward on the throttle, the engines going from purr to growl. “You can put her into it fast if you need to, but it’s courteous to give her time to warm up. Then, with _this_ switch here-“ she brushed her fingers over a gear on the side of the armrest, and clicked it forward- “you divert power to the thrusters.”  
  
They roared to life.  
  
“Then you ease her forward, just like so, give her a bit more power,” she coaxed the throttle and the joystick forward, “make sure you don’t tell her to go sideways when you’re on the ground, she’ll flip herself.” The _Remora_ crept forward.  
  
“And then you have a choice. You can either taxi about on the ground, or slowly take off. Or, my personal favorite…”  
  
She braced her index and middle finger on the back of the throttle.  
  
“…you can just fucking _go for it.”_  
  
Quick as a bird’s wing, she put the throttle forward two inches, and the _Remora_ lunged into the sky.  
  
“And now’s the fun part.” She kept feeding the thrusters more energy, and the roar morphed into a background whine, preparing to leave the atmosphere of that hellish planet. “M-ships have a _fantastic_ turn radius,” she explained, and guided the _Remora_ to circle over Krugarr’s might-have-once-been-an-M-ship, the golden shimmer of a hand-wave mandala visible even though he was just a tiny red dot now. “Hold on now,” she said, grinning, and the boy grabbed the control-free parts of the armrest as she put the _Remora_ into a roll.  
  
“If you can’t shoot ‘em down, and you can’t run away, then _dance,”_ she instructed. “M-ships are quick enough to dodge most blaster-fire, if you’re _careful.”_  
  
“This one understands,” Yondu said, and his eyes actually looked _alive._  
  
She banked the _Remora_ back the other way, then put her in a harsh climb, feeding the thrusters for the final push.  
  
And then they were among the stars.  
  
She could see the warships off in the distance, clustered like draft-animals in a stable, but they’d still be there in an hour.  
  
So Aleta took her hands off of the controls.  
  
“Go ahead, then. Try it out.”  
  
Yondu looked at her like she’d confessed to being the mother of the being whose skull was now called _Knowhere._ “Ma’am, are you- are you certain? This one has no piloting experience-“  
  
“This one has the basic theory,” she corrected, and leaned back in her chair. “Leave the landing to me, don’t hit anything big. I’ll take back control if things start to get fucked up.”  
  
He stared at her for a moment, those ruby eyes wide, then looked down at the controls, testing the throttle, listening for the thrusters’ whine to adjust.  
  
And then he positively _beamed._  
  
“This one understands, ma’am,” he said, and the _Remora_ wobbled in the extreme-upper atmosphere as he cautiously introduced himself to the joystick.  
  
She felt something warm in her chest, near her heart.  
  
_That planet was worth it._


	2. Water and Stone

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In some languages, the words for 'crew' and 'family' are the same.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I hope the length makes up for the wait! :)

In the Armada, the _Valkyrie_ and the _Sharpwing_ were unique in that they’d been built for each other.  
  
Sister-ships, in the truest sense of the word. They’d been commissioned at the same time, built in the same spaceport, in neighboring bays. It was no small thing, either, that they were among a select few Ravager warships that had actually been purpose-built for being Ravager ships, instead of _repurposed_ from previous owners.  
  
They were near perfect mirrors; the _Valkyrie_ was bigger and a bit more complex, of course, befitting Stakar’s position as semiofficial supreme-captain of the Armada, and she’d had different ideas on what made a good ship interior than Stakar did. But on the outside, besides the color, they were the same.  
  
They could’ve bought a planet- a _nice_ one too, not a shitty fireblasted rock on Andromeda’s fringes- with what they’d cost, but there were a lot of nice things about having a ship custom-built. Secret passages here and there, the cannons arrayed the way she wanted them, a proper observation deck instead of a few portholes near the cargo bay, little quality-of-life things.  
  
It hadn’t been too difficult to integrate an open-ended airlock onto each ship; they could move into position, link together, and function effectively as one unit, travel between the two as simple as walking across a hallway. She supposed it’d saved them quite a few units in transferring cargo between the ships, but mostly it was nice to be able to go and see each other without having go to through all the trouble of firing up an M-ship. The _Remora_ was beautiful and well-loved, of course, but she consumed fuel at a proportional rate worse than the _Sharpwing._  
  
There was probably some sort of mech-mod out there for that. Great, now fuel-efficiency would be the new thing to race to the top over. At least that one had the potential to save more money than it took to do…  
  
She chuckled to herself as she reached up, cut back power to the main thrusters and let the _Remora_ float into the docking bay, the forcefield making a soft buzzing sound as it slowed the ship to a stop.  
  
She looked down at her arm, remembered the broken comm-link, sighed, and pulled up the ship’s.  
  
“Hey, Marty,” she greeted, leaning back in her chair, head propped on her other hand in a semi-casual pose. “I heard some of my crew ended up over here last night.”  
  
“And vice versa,” Martinex replied. “It’s all a bit jumbled. Some of ours are there, and some of yours are here. Some of both never came back at all.”  
  
She pressed her lips into a thin line, nodded. “I’ll make my way down to medical. Could you ring the _Sharpwing,_ tell them they have my approval to start docking procedures for linking to the _Valkyrie?_ After you confirm with Stakar, of course.”  
  
“I could.”  
  
_“Marty.”_  
  
The Pluvian smiled, teeth glittering. “Consider it done.”  
  
“And one more thing. Stakar picked up a new recruit planetside. He’s with me, and he needs a full set of gear- leathers, a holster, that kind of thing.”  
  
“I’ll send someone down to take him to the tailor. Go ahead and go to medical, Captain.”  
  
“Thanks, Marty,” she said, and meant it.  
  
The ‘link went silent, so she stood up from their chair, catching the edge of it with her hand and twisting her torso, spine cracking audibly. “Somebody will come down and take you down to the tailor’s,” she told Yondu, who still sat in the copilot’s chair, looking vaguely dazed. “They’ll get you set up with proper gear- Stakar’s right, you can’t really be on his crew and not represent it. Don’t worry too much about the people here. I mean, we’re all thieves, but there’s honor among thieves, too. If you have any trouble, just let me or Stakar know, he should be back on board shortly.”  
  
“This one understands,” the boy replied, and he sounded almost breathless. It was the most emotion she’d gotten out of him yet.  
  
“I’m going down to the medical floor, so once you’re done at the tailor’s, just come find me there, or up at the bridge. Martinex can be a bit of a dick, but he’s nice once you get to know him. He likes to pick on new crew members. Don’t take too much of his shit.”  
  
“This one understands.” She felt his eyes on her as she walked away.  
  
“…Captain?”  
  
She turned, her eyebrows raised.  
  
“This one is grateful for the lesson you gave.”  
  
She smiled at him. “I’m looking forward to the next one.”  
  
It took a moment, but he smiled back at her, and pressed his fist to his chest.  
  
  
_*_  
  
  
This was a bad one.  
  
Not the worst- it could always be worse. One time they’d answered an emergency hailing from the Nova Corps; she hated the Nova Corps, but she hated the Kree even more, so the four captains- Charlie hadn’t had his own ship then, and it just would’ve meant more blood if he did- had roused up what had amounted to a considerable army. It was easy to get hands on deck when Nova Prime herself was promising a part of Xandar’s riches to the nearest ship who’d come beat the Kree back from an outpost. The planet was called Khyno Rhee _,_ just a little thing, more rock than grass. It promised good money, dead Kree; it should’ve been a good job.  
  
They left with half the crew they’d come with.  
  
The Prime had lauded them with praise, tried to convince them to take another assignment. _With all due respect, we simply cannot sustain a loss of this magnitude again,_ Aleta had refuted, soft and calm and quiet, as she always was when she needed to be, even though she’d been awake through the night, thinking about _something_ that could have been done differently, _anything,_ that could have stopped the massacre.  
  
The Nova weren’t systemically rotten the way the Kree were. Individual officers and outposts, yeah, actual hell come to be in physical form. But there weren’t slave pits on Xandar, no state-sanctioned purchase and theft of babies from cradles.  
  
She came to another body, murmured soft words, made sure the offerings were as they needed to be, so that the deceased could have what they needed when they went out among the stars.  
  
They couldn’t tell who it was. The body wore one of Aleta’s green coats, but the face was gone. Chunks were gone out of the neck, with the last imprint of a humanoid bite mark on the shoulder where whatever had been feasting on _one of her fucking crew_ got interrupted. Her hands shook- rage, hot _rage-_ as she laid a ribbon over where the eyes _should_ have been, and another where a mouth had been. Red blood, humanoid… she went through a list in her head, added a few more possible names to the bedside holo-pad. Process of elimination. Find out who was dead, who wasn’t, check off who could be accounted for, hope you only had one name left when you were done. After the Nova commission, the unidentifiable lists had been in the high hundreds, not to mention the missing.  
  
At least Xandarians didn’t eat the bodies of the dead.  
  
She whispered praise, reassurances, promises, and moved on.  
  
She stepped around the ones in blue coats, her eyes cast to the floor in respect. It wasn’t her place to speak to them; they were Stakar’s, in life and in death.  
  
In some languages, the word for _crew_ and _family_ were the same. There was a certain bond, on these ships at least, between each of the members. Petty thievery, little fights, yeah, that was just the way things went; sometimes you _really_ wanted somebody’s pretty little new blaster gun and then they’d be obligated to fight you for it again. But you didn’t steal _big_ things, like the only thing they brought from home, or something they’d worked a year to get. And you sure as hell didn’t outright stab someone in the back.  
  
She closed her eyes for a moment, sighed deeply, and moved on to the next body.  
  
_“…may your soul fly free among the stars. You will be remembered with us.”_  
  
Promises. Reassurances. Praise. A last goodbye, from this world before the transfer to the next.  
  
It was the captain’s duty to say goodbye, to those they led into danger, those under their protection whom had laid down their lives, whom they had failed. Captain’s duty, to carry the weight of those souls under their command, the ones currently on the ship and the ones taken away before their time was done.  
  
To remember.  
  
Aleta was many things, but _forgetful_ was not one of them.  
  
  
_*_  
  
  
“Hey, Martinex. Can I ask you for another favor?” Her voice was light and joking to any passing observer, but he knew that this was the tone she used to crack one last laugh before slaughtering everyone in the room.  
  
His golden eyes appraised her warily. “Of course, Captain.”  
  
Her sleeves were soaked with the blood of her people, and it was splattered on her face, drying on her hands.  
  
“Wire an order to the _Sharpwing_ to blow that fucking warship out of the sky. I don’t even want to be able to see dust from it. I want it fucking _gone.”_  
  
Martinex lifted his head, crystals gleaming.  
  
“Consider it done.”  
  
  
_*_  
  
  
She was on the _Sharpwing,_ taking care of her responsibilities there when a hand came to rest at the small of her back. She finished her rites, slowly and with due care, and then leaned into his side.  
  
“This is my fault,” Aleta murmured, looking out over the bodies on stretchers, nearly a hundred just in this room.  
  
Stakar pulled her closer, shook his head. “You had no way to know that warship would be there. They lured us into a trap, and it was a good one. We got cocky. It was a joint mistake.”  
  
“Joint means _both._ Look. For every one you lost, I lost four more. _That_ is my fault, Stakar. I wasn’t training them well enough. I should have drilled them more. I got so caught up in the next job, all the petty shit, I never looked down and noticed I was leaving my crew in the dirt. I failed them, I-“  
  
_“Aleta.”_ He pulled her into his arms, bloodstains and all.  
  
She let herself shiver for a moment, but refused to weep. It was one thing to mourn in private, but her crew needed their _Captain,_ not _Aleta,_ especially now, when there were so many dead, so many wounds still bleeding, physical and beyond.  
  
She took a sharp, deep breath, bracing a hand against his chest.  
  
“I need to finish this,” she whispered.   
  
She felt him nod, and he stepped back from her, holding her shoulders in her hands.  
  
“I think,” he started, his thumb massaging the tight knot in the muscle at the base of her neck, “there’s enough room on the _Valkyrie_ for both of our crews to have dinner together tonight. They can commiserate, maybe have a few drunken fights. It’d boost morale. They spend so much time together that they all know each other and the line between yours and mine gets blurry sometimes, anyway.”  
  
“It does, doesn’t it.” She placed her hands over his, smiled sadly. There would be a time for mourning, a time to let the pain wash over her until the tide passed and she could breathe again with the weight of another memory of another failure on her back, but it wasn’t now. She curled her hand around one of his. “I’m sorry that this happened. You still lost too many.”  
  
“We both did,” he reminded her quietly.  
  
They got back to work.  
  
  
_*_  
  
  
It wasn’t a particularly rare thing for this to happen, but it was rare for it to be this somber of an event.  
  
Aleta watched their crews comingle, a few of Krugarr’s red-orange and Mainframe’s purple jackets sticking out among blue and green. Normally, a Ravager get-together wasn’t complete until at least ten or twenty people were down in the medbay, but it wasn’t like that tonight. The hall was full of quiet murmurs, clinking glasses; condolences, recounted tales, toasts to the dead.  
  
“This is a good thing for them,” Cara said by her side. “Put it out in the open, rinse the salt out of the wounds.”  
  
“It helps that we won,” Aleta commented.  
  
“That too.”  
  
She wrapped an arm around Cara’s shoulders, reaching over and lightly tousling her first mate’s pale blonde hair, normally kept styled and spiky, but not tonight. “I’m glad you didn’t get hurt down there. Not sure what I’d do without you to help manage all of this.”  
  
Cara chuckled, blue-grey eyes dark in the low light. “I imagine you’d do whatever you did before you had me to help, Captain.”  
  
“It wasn’t as good as having you,” Aleta contended. “Payroll is less fun when there’s nobody to talk it over with.”  
  
“You always have Stakar.”  
  
“You know I hardly ever let him on the _Sharpwing.”_  
  
“I suppose,” Cara sighed. “A good part of the crew is glad for it, too, although they don’t mind him. It’s a good thing you do for them, all of it, not just that. I hope you don’t ever doubt it.”  
  
“It’s one of the few good things I’ve done with my life, Cara,” Aleta murmured.  
  
“Oh, don’t say that. There’s got to be at least five. That makes it _several,_ not a _few._ ”  
  
Aleta laughed, and changed the subject. “How’s little Kraglin doing?”  
  
“He’s alright. Scared. He was worried about me yesterday.”  
  
“Of course he was.” Saying that made something hurt in her chest; she swallowed a lump in her throat. “Children worry about their mothers, Cara. Especially when they’re as young as him.”  
  
“I know.” She leaned in closer, both of them drawing some modicum of strength from the warmth that gathered between them, the solidity of another presence. “I worry about him, too. About what would have happened if I’d moved a second too late, gone right instead of left. It’s-“  
  
“-not you,” Aleta finished. “But him.”  
  
Cara slumped slightly. “Yes, Captain,” she agreed quietly. “I know there’s a place for me in the stars, where I can go rejoin those who went before me, the Colors lighting my way. But I don’t know what will happen to him when I’m gone.”  
  
_Maybe I’ll make it up to five good things,_ Aleta thought.  
  
“Caraginei,” Aleta said solemnly, “I promise you, on my life, my husband’s life, on my ship and her crew, that so long as I draw breath, your son will be as safe as I can make him.”  
  
Cara met her eyes, then, and didn’t look away for a long time.  
  
“He might be half Nova, but he’s alright,” Aleta said absently, breaking eye contact to scan the crowd again. “I’m sure, someday, he’ll be a fine addition to the _Sharpwing’s_ crew. There will always be a spot for him in her quarters.”  
  
Cara’s hand fisted in the front of Aleta’s jacket, just under her golden-flame badge. She pulled her captain around to face her properly.  
  
“Thank you,” she whispered, her voice shaking, eyes shimmering with unshed tears. “That… it means a lot to me, Captain, more than you could ever know.”  
  
_I do know._ “There’s other places, safer places,” Aleta reminded her. “The _Sharpwing_ is, at the end of the day, a warship. I can’t promise he’d never be in danger.”  
  
“Is anywhere ever safe, Aleta?” She pulled her closer. “They told us we were safe on Xandar, and our village was levelled. They told us we were safe on Syvox Three, and it doesn’t exist anymore. They told my husband he was safe in his starcraft, and he died in flight, without enough of him left to bury. But _you._ I asked you, all that time ago, if my boy would be safe on your ship, if I could find peace there. And you told me-“  
  
“-you wouldn’t find safety, wouldn’t find peace, but you’d find _revenge.”_  
  
_“And I did,”_ Cara said fervently, eyes bright. “I asked you to deliver me the vengeance you promised, before I donned a green coat and pledged myself to your crew, my life to yours. And you took me in the _Remora,_ and we hunted down the asteroid where those sons of bitches that killed my boy’s father lived, and you turned it to ash the way they did Syvox Three. And as the glowing dust drifted past, you turned to me, and instead of demanding payment, or service, you asked me-“  
  
“If you wanted to do another,” Aleta answered, and grinned.  
  
“I was nothing to you then, but you gave me _justice._ It was more than the Prime ever did for me by a long shot. And I’m not the only one. What you do, with your crew, with the _Sharpwing,_ sometimes I think you should call it the _Sanctuary_ instead. You take in the ones who don’t have anything left, you give them _justice,_ and then you give them the whole damn universe.”  
  
“I think you might be exaggerating just a _bit-“_  
  
_“Listen_ to me, this is important,” Cara insisted. “I know you doubt yourself at night, that you see the faces of the ones we lost every time you close your eyes. You don’t forget a single one. You’re a damn sight better of a captain than you think you are. Everyone we lost on that rock chose to be there, laid their lives down for you because they _believe_ in you.”  
  
“If their lives are the cost, then maybe they shouldn’t.”  
  
“It’s not a cost, it’s a _gift,”_ Cara breathed. “Don’t ever question that. You gave them their freedom, to choose what to do with their lives. They chose to follow you, and knew the risks when they did so. We all do. You’ve made it abundantly clear anyone who doesn’t want to be here doesn’t have to be. They choose to stay, choose to fight, choose to die.”  
  
“How much have you had to drink, again?” It was a clumsy redirection, but she was still raw and aching from the fight, from the loss, and she wasn’t quite ready to delve into her feelings about it yet.  
  
“Not so much that I won’t remember this tomorrow. I _mean_ it, Captain, every word.”  
  
Aleta gently pried Cara’s fingers off of the front of her jacket, interlacing their fingers delicately. Cara had always been a bit on the small side, slightly waifish; Aleta’d been convinced a stiff breeze could take her out until she’d seen her down in the weapons practice arena, cutting into a mannequin with a machete like it had personally wronged her. She’d had no technique, of course, but that could be taught.  
  
The inner steel, the loyalty, the _goodness_ that was just so _Cara_ couldn’t be.  
  
“Come on.” She gently tugged on her first mate’s hands. “There’s someone I want you to meet.”  
_  
  
*_  
  
  
The boy was looking far better than the last time she’d seen him. He was still favoring his left leg, holding one of his arms close to his body, but time healed most physical wounds. She had to admit that the navy-blue leathers did go well with his skin tone after all.  
  
He straightened when he saw her, double-tapping his fist above his heart. _Good, someone taught him how to do it properly._  
  
“Cara,” she began, gently pulling the other woman alongside her, “this is Yondu Udonta. Stakar found him down planetside during the battle, and he came over to our side. Yondu, this is Caraginei Obfonteri, first mate of the good ship _Sharpwing.”_  
  
“It is this one’s pleasure,” the boy said, dipping his head and adding an epithet that her translator chip had no equivalent for.  
  
“And mine,” Cara replied pleasantly, extending her hand. The boy stared at it warily, then slowly reached out to take it.  
  
“I trust you’ve found it satisfactory here?” Cara asked, slipping back into the mantle of second-in-command that fit her so well. “I might not _officially_ be in charge around here, but I can annoy Martinex into doing nearly anything.”  
  
Aleta laughed as the boy murmured reassurances that yes, it was _beyond_ satisfactory, and fifty other things that she still didn’t know how the Kree had time to sit around and hear.  
  
A few of her dead had had small holes through the body, maybe a unit-coin-sized, at most. She understood now what that meant.  
  
She forgave him. There’d never been anything to forgive.  
  
He’d been alone, and afraid. All she could do was make sure it wouldn’t happen again.  
  
  
_**_  
  
  
“Alright, Cara. Let’s send them home.”  
  
“Yes, Captain,” Cara murmured from the comm-piece in Aleta’s ear. Cara was down below, supervising the cremations and release; Aleta sat in the captain’s chair, directing the rites.  
  
She took a deep breath, steeled herself, and fired the flares just as the glittering ashes issued from a port in the hull, close to the bridge where a glass wall allowed for observation of events outside.  
  
She flicked the intercom system on, her voice echoing back to her from the halls as she listed the names of the lost and gone, the ones passing by. This wouldn’t be the only release; there was only so much room in the incinerators, after all.  
  
A green glow stayed in front of them as the ashes twinkled and began to scatter in the solar wind; off to the side, she could see a blue burst from the _Valkyrie_ as she, too, sent off her dead.  
  
“…they will be remembered with us,” Aleta finished, pressing her fist over her heart twice, the sound of hand-on-leather echoing back to her from the assembled crew on the bridge. The _Sharpwing_ was silent as a graveyard.  
  
They were in one now, Aleta supposed, and began a new list on Cara’s prompting, as more ashes went into the sky.  
  
The green flare flashed again, and she wondered who would show the colors for her when her time came. Cara had another seventy or so years left on her natural lifespan, and maybe five centuries if she went for some low-level cybernetics, more if she got more involved. Would the _Sharpwing_ even continue to sail if she wasn’t there to head it, or would Stakar tuck it away in some corner of the galaxy?  
  
What would she do with the _Valkyrie_ if he went first?  
  
Five hundred years, Aleta thought, or they could all die tomorrow, or even right now, from a cloaked Kree warship sneaking up on them, nearly all of both ships’ crews watching the funerary ceremonies.  
  
She thought of Kraglin, small and sweet, and of Yondu, who she’d heard barely flinched when one of the medics reset his broken wrist. She couldn’t think too deeply about what had been done to him without having to fight off the temptation to go raze Hala herself, civilian casualties be damned. They’d lost the right to claim that protection when they took children and made them tools, beating babies into warriors and laborers and courtesans.  
  
She thought of a black collar on Kraglin’s neck, and further back, to her own children, and tasted bile.  
  
“They will be remembered with us,” she called out, again double-tapping her fist above her heart, the sound echoing back to her hundredfold.  
  
She began anew, firing the flares, and thought of Khyno Rhee, when they’d had to spread the funerals out over _days._  
  
And she began another list.  
  
  
_*_  
  
  
“Remind me again, what was the name of that planet?”  
  
“Orphaned moon,” Cara corrected. “It’s mother planet was destroyed during another leg of the Kree-Xandarian war. It settled into an orbit around the star with a little trading colony on it manned by survivors from the original planet. They’re all gone now, of course, killed when the warship we fought came and scooped the star for fuel. Speaking of that warship, it seems to have disappeared. Did you or Stakar have it taken apart for salvage?”  
  
“No, I had Marty atomize it.”  
  
“Bit wasteful, don’t you think, captain?”  
  
“It made me feel better.”  
  
Cara snorted. “Anyway, the moon was called Vaikos. It meant _ocean star_ in the language of the people who lived there, on account of how it glowed when it rose over the sea.”  
  
“You seem oddly familiar with it.”  
  
“I got bored on the way here,” Cara admitted with a shrug as they walked side-by-side down the _Sharpwing’s_ halls, making their way to the _Valkyrie,_ the funeral complete _._ “Read up on it a bit. It’s a tragedy, really, the local people were a sort of aquatic biped. Had the most fascinating crests and frills on their necks, and gills. They could breathe air or water, and worshipped the _all-mother,_ a sea goddess who controlled the tides and the fishing harvest.”  
  
“There wasn’t much water on Vaikos, was there?”  
  
“No, Captain. It was nearly a desert. Cliffs and savannah, and not much else.”  
  
Another mournful tale among the millions the war had made, Aleta thought. An aquatic, ocean-worshipping people driven from their spiritual home onto a desert planet. Villages razed. Children killed, children enslaved, children sold. Outer colonies destroyed. Pilots shot down. A thousand little tragedies, each on its own worthy of a song or a tome, but together just statistics.  
  
Families shattered, homes lost.  
  
She put an arm around Cara’s shoulders.  
  
“At least we made it right, as far as we could,” Aleta murmured.  
  
“That we did, Captain,” she reaffirmed, and Aleta thought of the glittering, glowing dust that had been left when they’d collected the blood debt the Kree had owed for Syvox Three. “That we did.”  
  
  
_*_  
  
  
These were new boots, nice ones, and they hadn’t even seen the outside of the ship yet, so she went ahead, leaned back in her chair, and put her feet on the table.  
  
Damn, they _were_ nice boots. She should give the tailor a raise.  
  
“So why are we all here, again?” she asked pointedly, looking across the table at Stakar. “We could have done this just as well over video-call. Now we’re in a circle and not saying anything at all.”  
  
“I was _thinking,”_ Stakar said with the tone of one who has transcended the adjective _long-suffering,_ “that as long as we’ve got everyone here, we might as well make an exercise out of it.”  
  
“Not everyone’s here,” Aleta cut in.  
  
“Yeah!” Mainframe’s eyes lit up, her head perched on the edge of the table, not so close as to risk falling. “Where’s Charlie? It’s not _everyone_ until Charlie’s here too, Stakar.”  
  
“He couldn’t make it,” Martinex explained from his post of standing behind Stakar’s chair, a mirror of Aleta and Cara. “He’s out on a job in Andromeda right now. Sends his regrets. Wishes he could’ve been here, all of that. Condolences too.”  
  
“I don’t want his condolences, I want his ability to punch through five inches of star-forged steel,” Aleta muttered, and Mainframe laughed.  
  
“We need money for repairs,” Stakar began. “We lost several M-ships during the fight down on Vaikos, and others took damage. I’m sure still more are due for upgrading. Marty?”  
  
Martinex produced a holo-pad. “Several maintenance rotas are calling for major upgrades to integral ship systems. Three of our groups need full steering system rebuilds, four need engine rebuilds, and two more could use landing gear upgrades. At my last count, eighty ships were in severe need of repainting, with sixty more in moderate need. As for turbine geometry-“  
  
Aleta held up a hand.  
  
“Okay, so, your maintenance teams have been slacking off.” Stakar glared at her; she ignored him for now. “Krugarr?”  
  
He, also, produced a holo-pad, but passed it to her instead.  
  
“Repairs… upgrades… supplies… general wear and tear. Fair enough.” She passed back the holo-pad, smirked at Stakar when he _still_ scowled at her for stealing control of the meeting.  
  
She braced herself. “Mainframe?”  
  
“Oh, the _Circuitry’s_ thrusters took a hit a few weeks back, they need major recalibrations and parts repair,” Mainframe rattled off at near-lightspeed. “I have some M-ships whose engines need rebuilding, and more with mid-level repairs, and the _Circuitry_ needs a full electronics check anyway, but I haven’t had the time, you know how it goes, I’ve been getting so behind, and she needs a good cleaning too.”  
  
Aleta blinked.  
  
“Cara?” She asked, waving a hand and leaning back in her chair.  
  
Cara stepped forward, a holo-pad at the ready.  
  
“Twenty-two M-ships were unsalvageable and need replacing,” she read off. “We were able to get some tech back off of some of them, but the ships were toast, and dozens of others need major repair. The _Sharpwing_ needs an electronics calibration-“  
  
“Ooh, I could do that!” Mainframe chirped.  
  
“-and her engines need a regular full disassembly, fluid-change and clean,” Cara continued. “Forgive me, Krugarr, but isn’t the _Serpentine_ due for the same?”  
  
The _Serpentine?_ What was-  
  
oh, _fuck._  
  
“You _asshole._ I can’t believe you let me humiliate myself like that.”  
  
He flashed her a laughing-face mandala as he nodded.  
  
“Yeah, okay, _dick.”  
  
_ She sighed.  
  
“And you’re honestly telling me that we’re flat broke, that we can’t even afford to repaint an M-ship?” She looked directly at Stakar. “Last I checked, our coffers were nice and full.”  
  
“I want to go steal some shit,” he snapped. “We’ve been cooped up star-side for so long, the crews are getting antsy.”  
  
“Speak for yourself,” Mainframe beeped again, and Krugarr nodded in agreement.  
  
“The team’s all together _besides Charlie,_ and it’d be good for morale to go have a successful job to distract them from this mess.” Stakar waved a hand to indicate the general area of space in general. “It’d do _me_ good.”  
  
Aleta pursed her lips, nodded.  
  
“All in favor of stealing some shit?”  
  
“Oh, God, it’ll be so fun!” Mainframe squeaked, and Krugarr summoned a thumbs-up mandala.  
  
“That settles that, then. So… did you actually have a _plan_ for whose shit we’re going to steal, or did you just figure we’d find that out along the way?”  
  
“If you’d let me _talk,_ you’d know,” Stakar growled.  
  
“Well _talk_ then,” Aleta said dismissively, and settled further into the chair.  
  
It was a nice chair, too. Did they have a chair-building guy? If they did, he deserved a raise, too.  
  
“Hey, why didn’t you just open the meeting by saying you want to go steal some shit? When have any of us ever said no to stealing shit?”  
  
_“Aleta!”_  
  
She rolled her eyes, but shut her mouth.  
  
“As I was _going to say,”_ Stakar said, leaning forward and bracing himself on the table, “I’ve been approached by Taneleer Tivan about the retrieval of a precious artifact.”  
  
“Ooh, the _Collector,”_ Mainframe chirruped. “What did he want?”  
  
“We’re to go to Knowhere for negotiations, and then he’ll tell us more about it.”  
  
“That place is creepy as hell,” Aleta complained, and got an agreeing nod from Krugarr.  
  
“Hell is less creepy,” Stakar corrected. “I always feel like the jaw of that thing is going to close down and trap everyone in there forever.”  
  
“Yeah, me too,” Mainframe tossed in, and Krugarr nodded again.  
  
“Creepy as it may be,” Stakar said, pulling the conversation back on track, “he said he’s willing to pay a _generous_ amount for the retrieval of whatever this thing is. Sounds like it’s a heavily guarded sort of expensive, not a hard-to-reach kind of expensive. You’d have enough profit to make that trip to Bhakatta Nine,” he added slyly, making eye contact with her, and she smirked back at him, biting her lip.  
  
She felt a slight flush creep into her cheeks, like she was some _schoolgirl_ instead of a warship captain.  
  
“If you two want to flirt, Krugarr and I can go,” Mainframe volunteered cheerfully. “Or, if you want to do more than flirt, _please_ let Krugarr and I go.”  
  
He still hadn’t broken eye contact. She wasn’t going to be the first one to do it either.  
  
“Cara,” she breathed, “could you be a dear and tell the engineers on the _Sharpwing_ to coordinate with the ones on the _Valkyrie_ to set a course for Knowhere?”  
  
“Of course, Captain,” Cara answered primly, humor bubbling just underneath. “I’ll go and do that right now.”  
  
“Wonderful,” Aleta murmured.  
  
“And that’s us gone,” Mainframe said by way of goodbye as Krugarr gently picked her up and carried her out. Martinex followed them, his head bowed, probably hiding one of his shit-eating grins.  
  
The door clicked behind them.  
  
Stakar leaned further over the table; she remained in her reclined pose, but her muscles tensed, her heartbeat picking up.  
  
Even after all these years, those grey eyes could still pierce right down into her soul, still ignited a fire there.  
  
“You know you like it when I take charge at these things,” she told him, and grinned. “Don’t you get sick of being supreme overlord of everything once in a while?”  
  
“It makes me look bad, ‘Leta,” he reprimanded. It would have been menacing if he hadn’t been smiling at her.  
  
“In front of Mainframe and Krugarr?” She rolled her eyes again. _“Please._ If that’s what makes them change their minds on you, check them for parasites.”  
  
He leaned back, stood, caught the tip of her boot in his hand as he rounded the table. “Does Mainframe get parasites, or viruses?” he wondered, his hand trailing down her leg.  
  
She furrowed her brow, staring at the opposite wall like it had answers. “Shit, now I’m going to be wondering that for the next five years. Thanks.”  
  
“Maybe it’s parasites if it’s an insect or something, but a virus if it’s digital?” His fingers danced over her hip, began undoing the buttons on her jacket.  
  
“No, they’re taking her power to feed themselves, that’s like, the _textbook_ definition of a parasite. So maybe she can have parasites _and_ viruses, and viruses that are parasites, but not all parasites are viruses. Squares and rectangles, that kind of thing.” His hand slid under her jacket, and her breath caught.  
  
“Maybe,” he conceded, and she reached out to undo his jacket in turn. “But what if she gets hacked? What does that equate to?”  
  
Her hands froze.  
  
“…Shit, I don’t know,” she muttered. “That’s above my pay grade. See, you _do_ like it when I take charge at meetings. Unless that’s a quad-blaster in your pocket-“  
  
His other hand caught her under her jaw, tilting her head up. When his lips met hers, she was already laughing.  
  
_  
*_  
  
  
It's later, when they’d made it into his private quarters, that the question comes back to her.  
  
She reached out with the arm she wasn’t laying on, cradled his face, brushing her thumb lightly over his cheekbone.  
  
“What would you do with the _Sharpwing_ if I died?”  
  
He opened his eyes, and they looked almost as old as they actually were.  
  
For a long time, he didn’t move at all. She knew he was imagining it, and wondered if it hurt him as badly as it hurt her to imagine it the other way around.  
  
Finally, he reached out, resting his hand on her side as if to reassure himself that she still breathed, her heart still beat.  
  
“Let Caraginei take command, I suppose,” he said quietly. “If that’s what she wanted. Otherwise, maybe I’d park it next to Arcturus, let it settle into orbit. Open it up to habitation, maybe, let people come and have a home and a sanctuary there. I’d tell myself that’s what you’d want, and try to call it good.”  
  
_And I’d shatter the homeworld of whatever killed you_ went unspoken, but it didn’t need to be said.  
  
She nodded, blinked away tears.  
  
“Why? What would you do with the _Valkyrie?”_  
  
“Ask Marty if he wanted it,” she answered immediately, and laughed sadly. “Then… I’d probably park it next to Arcturus. Let it be silent. Release the crew to other ships, and let the _Valkyrie_ rest. Let her orbit Arcturus with the rest of the ghosts.”  
  
“Don’t think you’d be returning home much, then, if you did.”  
  
“No,” she agreed, and a tear made its way down her face. “It wouldn’t be home anymore, not without you there. It’d be a graveyard.”  
  
He moved his hand, threading his fingers through her hair. “What had you thinking about that at all?”  
  
“I got introspective during the Colors earlier,” she confessed. “You know how it goes, when the lists get long, the horror fades to white noise and you get to thinking about all sorts of morbid shit. And I just-“  
  
Her voice broke.  
  
She leaned into the warmth of his arms, and let the pain come home.  
  
  
_*_  
  
  
It's later when she opens her eyes again, and those grey ones are already watching her, a hand softly stroking her hair.  
  
“Better?” Stakar asked softly, like she was a fragile glass thing, and too sharp of a sound could make her shatter.  
  
“Better,” she reaffirmed, and took a deep breath, savoring the feeling of the air in her lungs, of being alive.  
  
“Why do you still let it hurt so deeply?” he wondered, genuine curiosity in his eyes. “If it causes you such pain, why don’t you remove yourself from it? Pull away, quit caring so much?”  
  
She smiled at him then, without showing her teeth, and reached out, holding his face with both of her hands.  
  
“Stakar,” she said gently, “the day it quits hurting is the day I eat my blaster, and not one day more.”  
  
She watched the resignation settle over his expression, sadness come back into his eyes.  
  
“So be it, then.”  
  
  
_*_  
  
  
She pulled on her coat, rolling her shoulders and reaching for her wrist-comm out of habit before she noticed the broken glass on the face.  
  
She twisted it in her hand, watching the light glimmer off of the shards.  
  
“What happened to that thing, anyway?” Stakar asked offhandedly, looking over as he got dressed.  
  
“Oh, I stopped a knife with it,” she said, and laughed at how absurd that sounded. “One of the Pureborn soldiers was coming at me from behind, and I never noticed until I turned around to punch him. I had my arm extended to hit him in the head, and this poor thing took the knife.”  
  
He stared at her. “Are you going deaf or something?”  
  
“In _my_ defense, an M-ship had just crashed fifty feet away from me and was spraying hot fuel everywhere,” she snapped. “Let’s see you hear a Kree sneaking up on you while it’s raining burning jet fuel.”  
  
“It was a fucking _Kree,_ Aleta, they aren’t exactly known for their stealth!”  
  
_“My ears were ringing!_ I couldn’t even hear myself breathe!”  
  
“Maybe you weren’t, and it was hypoxia,” he muttered, bending over to pull on his boots.  
  
She mumbled some vague insult back at him, and tossed the wrist-comm back on the bedside table. “It’s not gonna do me a whole lot of good like this, is it?” she queried when he looked at her again. “And I have you and Cara and Martinex if anyone _really_ needs to get a hold of me. I’ve managed just fine for the past few days without it.”  
  
Had it really already been a few days?  
  
She shook her head, fastened her belt, straightened her coat. “So who are we taking with us to Knowhere?”  
  
“I was figuring a proper delegation,” Stakar answered. “Bring a small squadron of M-ships, maybe Mainframe could bring her body- the full one, you know, the one that can wipe out asteroids?”  
  
Aleta grinned. “That one’s my favorite. Could you have Marty ping Charlie, see where he is? I’m sure he’s going to want to come along for this.”  
  
“Why don’t you have Cara do it?”  
  
“Because they always take three hours each time they talk. He won’t stop flirting with her. She flirts back, too, but she’s got no interest in taking it any further. I think she goes for tall and lanky, not tall and bulky. Have you seen Kraglin lately? He’s taller than any Xandarian his age has a right to be.”  
  
He laughed at that. “Haven’t you seen the way she looks at _you?_ Sometimes I worry about what happens on the _Sharpwing_ during deep-space flights.”  
  
“Like you don’t have a frequent-flier-rewards-card at the Iron Lotus,” Aleta retorted, but she was biting back a smile.  
  
“I never said it was a _bad_ thing, just that I’d like to know before my wife runs off with her first mate and leaves me in the dust.”  
  
“What, so that you can intercept, kill the competition and take me back to the _Valkyrie_ so that you can keep me for yourself forever?”  
  
“So that I can put a tracker on the _Remora_ and crash the wedding,” he fired back, and they both laughed.  
  
  
_*_  
  
  
She did end up pinging Cara, from the integrated wall comm-unit that nearly every room on the _Valkyrie_ had.  
  
Cara’s face jerked into view on the screen, her hair still bed-frazzled, pointing several directions. “Captain Stakar, s-“  
  
Cara narrowed her eyes.  
  
“Well, somebody had fun last night,” she accused, and Aleta grinned sheepishly.  
  
“Guilty as charged,” Aleta admitted. “I was wondering if you were interested in-“  
  
A sharp squeal interrupted her; Aleta tilted her head, and Cara sighed, bending over out of sight of the camera.  
  
“Kraglin, sweetheart, I’m in the middle of a call right now, and it’s very important.”  
  
Aleta pressed her hand to her mouth to stifle laughter.  
  
“Give me five minutes, okay?” Cara’s soft voice- the tone only her son and _maybe_ Aleta got to hear- still felt reassuring even through a comm line. Aleta couldn’t help but smile at Kraglin’s bright _“okay!”_ in response.  
  
“I was wondering if you wanted to come down to Knowhere with us,” Aleta continued. “We’re thinking of taking a few more M-ships than necessary, that sort of thing.”  
  
“Of course, Captain,” Cara answered, smoothing down her hair with her hands. “I might be a while-“  
  
“Oh, take your time, we won’t be leaving for a few hours anyway. Have breakfast with your boy, enjoy the morning. Don’t bother reporting to the bridge.”  
  
Cara smiled sweetly. “Thank you, Captain,” she said, and closed the line.  
  
“See, she’s busy,” Aleta told Stakar, waving a hand. “I guess Martinex is going to have to call Charlie after all.”  
  
  
_*_  
  
  
Charlie, it turned out, had just finished his job over in Andromeda, and was about three hundred jumps out. He’d responded with a resounding _aw_ hell _no_ when they’d asked him if he wanted to pass on the Collector’s job, though, so now they were negotiating for five instead of four.  
  
Aleta idly toyed with her new wrist-comm, waiting for a few more pieces to slide into place before they left. This one was heavier, and a bit bigger; Stakar had probably had them put some sort of titanium backing on it.  
  
She tapped her fingers against the face, sighed to herself, and leaned back against the _Remora’s_ hull.  
  
She kept playing with it, though, and eventually pulled up Stakar’s listing in her directory, giving the call-order.  
  
“I’m on my way down,” Stakar sighed. “Marty had some trouble, but he’s on his way down too. I’m bringing the new kid with me. I’m figuring it’ll be good for him to see how negotiating’s done. Don’t think he’s had much of a chance to see it before.”  
  
“Suppose not,” Aleta mused. She’d been about to suggest that exact thing herself.  
  
“You can go take the _Remora_ back to the _Sharpwing,_ collect up a half dozen good crew to make a show of it, if you’d like. Mainframe and Krugarr are doing the same thing.”  
  
“They’re coming with Cara. I figured that went with the _bringing more M-ships than we needed_ bill.”  
  
“Fair enough.”  
  
She tilted her head, intrigued by how much his mood had worsened since she’d left him. “What did Marty do this time?”  
  
“Lost his fucking keys.”  
  
She had to laugh at that.  
  
“So how are we playing this one?”  
  
They made a good team, when they worked together. She could be soft and calm and quiet, the easy-flowing river to his _unstoppable force/immovable object_ , or it could flip around.  
  
She could be a goddamn hurricane if she wanted to, and he could be the welcoming safety of the shore.  
  
Water and stone. It was the same way she got him to do anything really _big;_ working at him slowly, the occasional freeze-thaw.  
  
“Play it by ear,” Stakar decided, and she nodded even though he couldn’t see her. “See how it unfolds naturally. Might not have to do much of anything. Start out by playing nice, escalate from there.”  
  
“Sounds like a plan to me,” she agreed, and cut the call.  
  
  
_*  
  
_  
”Welcome to Knowhere, Captain Ogord,” an immaculately friendly, pitch-perfect voice called out.  
  
It came from a Krylorian girl, her skin more red than pink, her hair in a perfect mix of rolls and braids, not a single strand out of place. Her hand were interlocked just in front of her stomach, silver bracers just above her wrists, her dress plain white.  
  
Above the smile, her eyes looked dead.  
  
“Thank you,” Aleta replied in a gentle voice, stepping off of the _Remora’s_ loading ramp, playing the game.  
  
“You must be tired, after such a long journey,” the girl said, her voice like a trained singing-bird. “Please, if you will, allow me to greet the rest of your compatriots, and then I will escort you to the Collector.”  
  
“It was no trouble,” Aleta reassured her, waving a hand in dismissal, listening as the _Remora’s_ loading ramp locked back into place. She watched the girl walk over to the _Siren,_ and start her routine again.  
  
She wondered absently what had happened to the last girl, and figured she didn’t want to know.  
  
She could see Yondu, still higher up on the loading ramp, eyeing the Collector’s girl warily. One slave would know another in an instant, Aleta supposed, and watched him shift uncomfortably as Stakar exchanged pleasantries before the girl went down to Krugarr.  
  
Martinex, at Stakar’s side now, seemed to pout slightly.  
  
“I’d feel slighted, if I felt it would matter at all,” Cara said conversationally as she walked up, the rest of the selected crew trailing behind her. Good choices, Aleta noted, recognizing faces. Cara was always good at picking the right tool for the job.  
  
“She went from me to Stakar to Krugarr, and skipped Marty too, so don’t feel bad about it,” Aleta commented. “He’s trying to impress Stakar by having her go to _me_ first out of courtesy. She’s as dead-eyed as the last one, anyway. You wouldn’t like her.”  
  
“He has a new one already?”  
  
Aleta nodded.  
  
Somebody, at least, had warned the girl not to expect a response from Krugarr; she delivered her spiel, and went down to Mainframe, who _would_ feel slighted but wouldn’t say anything about being last.  
  
If she’d been the one running it, Aleta would have sent an attendant for _each_ guest, not making each one wait, but she wasn’t the one hiring five intergalactically-respected outlaws for a job.  
  
Mainframe had brought her fully equipped body this time; Aleta barely came up to its chest. Aleta was fairly sure it was bigger on the inside somehow; it approximated a bipedal humanoid, the legs and arms messes of thick hydraulic pistons and tubes and wires hidden under dark grey metal plating, the torso the same smooth grey. And full of more weapons than you could shake fifty sticks at, of course.  
  
It loomed above the attendant-girl, who seemed unfazed. Her face never changed from her friendly-greeting-mode, but there was nothing left of any sort of sentient being in her eyes.  
  
Aleta suppressed a shudder as the Krylorian walked out in front of them, turning and addressing Stakar more than the rest of them. “He is waiting for you; follow me, please.”  
  
_We’re equals here,_ Aleta wanted to say. _On paper he’s the one in charge, but each of us has a veto vote.  
  
_ But instead she was calm and quiet, and fell in beside Stakar as they followed the girl.  
  
She reached over with her hand, her knuckles bumping his; he took her hand, and she managed to keep her expression neutral as Mainframe’s heavy footsteps reverberated the ground behind them.  
  
“My master understands you’ve journeyed far,” the attendant said, leading them through the docking bays, up out of the mouth of the skull, towards where the brain had once been. “He sends his gratitude that you made the journey, and promises to make it worth your time. I am Lessai, his assistant. I’m to guide you around while you’re here.”  
  
“I don’t think that will be necessary,” Aleta responded coolly. “This isn’t our first time here.”  
  
“Of course,” Lessai said, bowing her head in humility. “Forgive me. I’m sure that you’ve seen most of the inhabited stations in this galaxy and the neighboring ones, what with how long you’ve been travelling them, Captain Ogord.”  
  
Aleta bit back the _be more specific_ remark, firstly because they were in the Diplomacy Stage and she wasn’t going to be the one to break it, and secondly because she _had_ been doing the interplanetary travel thing for quite a while now. Maybe not _most_ inhabited stations; they came and went so quickly, after all. Some of them she’d never even had a chance to visit.  
  
Like Syvox Three, she thought wistfully, tuning out the rest of the attendant’s chatter. Cara made it sound quite pleasant, as colonization/mining outposts went. The closest she’d ever come was watching its rubble float by when they’d answered the distress signals coming from the area.  
  
Did Vaikos count? Did going to an inhabited planet still count if it wasn’t inhabited anymore? Maybe that was another one of those parasite/virus things.  
  
Definitely not most. Maybe half, though, of the ones that had made it more than a hundred years? That sounded more reasonable.  
  
She mused on that the rest of the way, tallying planets and quadrants in her head until they entered the museum.  
  
And he’d had the audacity to call _her_ a kleptomaniac, Aleta thought, letting go of Stakar’s hand as she looked around. There was even more shit in here than last time. A quadrupedal, vaguely-predatory looking creature covered in fur and wearing an incredibly primitive spacesuit watched her go by from inside a glass box.  
  
“This way,” Lessai called, before they could get too entranced, or the crews’ fingers get too loose. She led them down a blindingly white hall, into a meeting room. The centerpiece was a pentagonal table, the room still large enough to fit the rest of the entourage.  
  
Aleta took her indicated seat, looking back as Cara settled into her post within arm’s reach of the back of the chair. “Vespa, could you remind me again how many ships we posted on watch for this?”  
  
Vespa was master- well, _mistress-_ of weaponry, third-in-command of the _Sharpwing._ “Forty-seven, ma’am,” she reported.  
  
“Thank you,” Aleta murmured, and wondered if she’d be able to keep herself from laughing if one of the chairs broke under Mainframe’s weight.  
  
It didn’t, though, and when they were all seated, the attendant left them with a _he’ll be right with you_ as she disappeared through a hidden door.  
  
She idly traced an imagined pattern on the table, studying its blank white surface. It felt like it was some sort of plastic.  
  
“Do you think he just had this sitting around, or had it made?” she wondered, tapping a finger against it.  
  
Stakar shrugged; Mainframe leaned forward, studying it further.  
  
“We should have waited for Charlie and brought him, just to watch him scramble for another seat,” Aleta mused.  
  
Stakar chuckled; Mainframe’s eyes brightened. “He doesn’t _scramble_ for anything,” Stakar said, now also regarding the table. The entire damn room was that same boring white; the crew members were starting to chatter, as bored crew tended to do. “I don’t think he’d even move quickly if he was on fire. He'd just walk slowly over to the nearest water source, and then sit around and feel sad that his clothes were burned when he could’ve prevented it in the first place.”  
  
“That seems like a realistic result,” Mainframe squeaked, and Krugarr nodded in agreement.  
  
“Probability that he’s watching us talk?”  
  
“Oh, it’s certain,” Stakar sighed, leaning back.  
  
“Hundred percent,” Mainframe beeped helpfully. “I’ve detected eight cameras in the room so far.”  
  
Aleta leaned back, resisted the urge to put her feet up on the table, give it some sign of use. The whole place just felt so _sterile._  
  
The attendant girl came back in, bowing to them before stepping to the side.  
  
“May I present Taneleer Tivan, the Collector!”  
  
His hair was of a color with Cara’s, but even paler, and Aleta found herself preferring the local variety. He didn’t look particularly old, either, but she knew that was a lie for him just as much as it was for her.  
  
“Captain Aleta, always a delight to see you again,” he purred, going to the empty spot at the table and reaching across to take her hand. She let him, and only smiled when he kissed it.  
  
Tivan took his spot, turning to Stakar. “How can you keep such a lovely jewel away from me for so long, Starhawk?”  
  
_Starhawk was me, too,_ Aleta thought petulantly. _I provided most of the power, but he gets all of the credit._  
  
It was another one of those _things_ she tried not to think about, though, so she didn’t hold it against him. If he wanted to be reminded of it all the time, so be it.  
  
“Easier than you might think, Tivan,” Stakar said warmly. “I’m a jealous man.”  
  
“You must come around more,” Tivan urged her. “I’m on the verge of acquiring several rather old Arcturan artifacts for my museum. I’d love to show them to you.”  
  
_I’d rather go to bed with an Aaskavarian,_ Aleta thought, but smiled at him all the same.  
  
“I’ll have to see if I can make it work.” _I’m going to be permanently busy for the next five millennia._ “I’m not accustomed to being around someone whose age is a considerable exponent of my own. It’s a bit of a refreshing break, not being the oldest one in the room.” _I hate it, you always treat me like a child and a whore at the same time and act like a know-it-all the whole way._  
  
He laughed at that. “I suppose it would be, Captain. Now, down to business, shall we? I’m sure you’re all very busy?”  
  
The way he’d looked at her made her want to be busy _right now, sorry, got to go, you know how novice crewmen are, my warship had a reactor meltdown,_ but she didn’t.  
  
It went beyond just the standard stare most males gave; the Collector looked at her _and_ her crew like they were so many more trinkets on shelves, to be used or bought or disposed of however he saw fit.  
  
Cara’s hand came to rest on the back of the chair, and it gave her some measure of solace.  
  
“I heard something about rare relics, that are difficult to retrieve?” Aleta prompted.  
  
“You did,” Tivan verified, producing a holo-pad and setting it on the table. “The Maw on Sakaar recently erupted again. I’ve heard that there are precious gems to be found in the ashes that it spat, if you’re willing to fight the Sakaarans for them.”  
  
“Just Sakaarans?” Stakar asked, and Krugarr tilted his head, intrigued.  
  
Aleta had to agree. Sakaarans weren’t worth the price they were being offered.  
  
“Well, you see,” Tivan began, and Aleta had to fight the urge to roll her eyes- “It’s been a bit of a hotbed lately. The Kree are setting up more outposts, broadening their recruitment efforts.”  
  
Behind Stakar, she saw Yondu stiffen.  
  
“There’s probably ten other species present on the planet too,” Tivan continued, a hologram projecting from the pad showing them Sakaar. The Maw was a supervolcano, close to the sea, in the middle of a mountain range. “They’re in the middle of something that could turn into a war right now, which is why nobody else has gone in and gotten the gems yet, and why I thought it’d be a good fit for your services. The four of you-“  
  
“Five,” Stakar corrected. “One couldn’t make it.”  
  
“That’s a shame,” Tivan pouted. “The _five_ of you, then, seem uniquely suited to the job, and you’re someone I can trust to actually complete it instead of just taking the gems and running off with them.”  
  
“And as compensation, for our good work and our honor?” Stakar asked pointedly.  
  
“I was thinking forty, to start.”  
  
“Fifty,” Stakar corrected. “You were expecting four warships; you got five. The ten-per-ship rate should still apply when the number increases.”  
  
“As it should, my friend,” Tivan said easily, shutting down the hologram and flicking through the pad’s menus.  
  
Aleta reached out, touching the corner of it; the screen went dark.  
  
He paused for a moment, staring at it before looking at her.  
  
“My dear, are you _ever_ going to tell me everything you can do?”  
  
“Taneleer,” she teased, “you _know_ a woman never reveals all of her secrets.”  
  
He smiled at her then, and a chill passed through her, but she collected herself.  
  
“Last I heard, the Sakaarans were developing some rather good anti-aircraft weaponry. That puts more of my M-ships at risk than there normally would be. I have to factor in cost of replacement to the upfront cost, of course.”  
  
“Of course,” Tivan repeated, trying and failing to get a response out of the holo-pad.  
  
“Especially for Captain Mainframe,” Aleta continued, gesturing. “Each of her ships sets a galaxy-wide gold standard for mechanical perfection. It costs her a great deal to build each one from scratch.”  
  
“Of course,” Tivan said. Aleta took pity on him, and tapped the holo-pad, giving the screen the ability to work again. “Would another eight be fair, Captain Mainframe?”  
  
“It costs me about three to build a standard M-ship,” Mainframe replied, her voice devoid of its usual melody. It went that way when she was running calculations. “Not to mention repair costs for ones that are damaged, which, of course, there will _always_ be some even if there are no major losses. Consumable parts, and the like.”  
  
“Yes, I know how it goes,” Tivan replied, and looked at Lessai as he did so. “Does fifteen for equipment repair sound fair, then?”  
  
Mainframe stared into the distance for a moment, then beeped. “It does!”  
  
“Wonderful.” Tivan pushed back his chair, standing and extending a hand to Stakar. “It’s been a pleasure doing business with you.”  
  
“And you as well,” Stakar answered, shaking his hand. “I’ll give you a better estimate on a timeframe when we get there.”  
  
“You have my full faith,” Tivan reassured him. “You’ve never failed me before, Starhawk.”  
  
“And I don’t intend to start now.” Stakar turned away, making for the door. “We won’t be needing an escort on the way out, thank you.”  
  
Aleta ignored whatever last courtesies the Collector threw after them, following Stakar out the door, Cara close in her shadow.  
  
“This one has a question,” a now-familiar voice asked at her side.  
  
“Ask it, then.”  
  
“What did you do to the holo-pad, back there?”  
  
“Oh, has nobody told you?” She snapped her fingers; the painful white brightness of the hallway lights morphed into a softer, gentle pale green. “I can control light. Manipulate it, change it a bit. It’s nothing terribly exciting. I didn’t need to touch the holo-pad to do it, but I wanted him to associate it going out with me.”  
  
Yondu seemed thoughtful. “Why?”  
  
“To make him take me seriously,” she sighed. “He always treats me like a child when I come here, and acts like I belong to Stakar and that he does all of my thinking for me. It gets old, fast.”  
  
Cara snorted; Aleta hooked an arm around her first mate’s shoulders.  
  
“Thirteen million units ain’t half bad, is it?” she asked, grinning as they walked through the museum, towards the brightness of Knowhere’s spaceport.  
  
“No, ma’am,” Cara said, laughing. “It isn’t half bad at all.”  
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Please leave comments! I'd love to hear what you thought, or suggestions, or any questions you might have. I'm mixing OC lore with comic book lore, and mixing the two since I've never read the comics, just browsed the wiki. If anything's unclear, just let me know.
> 
> And have a nice day! :)


	3. Circajian Honeycrisps for the Soul

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The Collector's a goddamn snake to work with, but damn if he doesn't pay well.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I am SO sorry that this took so long to post! I've been blitz-busy with college. :(

“Alright, everyone, _listen up!_ I’m only going to say this once!”  
  
_“Captain’s got announcements!”_ Cara shouted even louder, ever-present at Aleta’s right. It wasn’t the prettiest info-session they’d ever given, standing on a table in the largest mess hall, but it was convenient and quick, less time wasted for mustering.  
  
“We’ve got a job,” Aleta called out, the myriad rustling and murmurs of the assembled crew dying away. She straightened, the overhead fluorescents making the golden flame over her heart gleam. “Collecting up some gems out on Sakaar! We’re going in by the Maw, beating back anyone who tries to stop us, taking the jewels up out of the ashes, and going back out. We’re going to have four other warships!”  
  
A general murmur of surprise went up at that.  
  
“Stakar, Mainframe, Krugarr, and Charlie-27 are coming along for the ride! The Sakaarans have allied themselves with the Kree-”  
  
A ripple of dismay and disgust went through the crowd before she was even done with the sentence. She gave them a moment, then nodded, and Cara pulled their attention back up front with a shout.  
  
“The Sakaarans have allied with the Kree!” Aleta shouted again. “There are Kree outposts planetside, but as far as we know, they have yet to receive a resident Accuser. The way I figure it, we owe a blood debt to the Kree that needs repaying!”  
  
A roar of assent was her reply. She grinned wolfishly.  
  
“Our share of the pot is thirteen million units. What do you say to that?”  
  
The response was nearly deafening.  
  
She chuckled to herself, didn’t wait for them to quiet down before she cupped her hands around her mouth as an improvised amplifier.  
  
_“We’re getting underway in four hours! Dismissed!”_  
  
The general chatter turned into a dull roar as the assembly made for the various exits; Aleta hopped down from the table, and heard Cara do the same behind her.  
  
“I want weapons drills, two-hour shifts, for every crew member who’ll be in fighting form by the time we get to Sakaar,” Aleta said as she held a door open for Cara, Vespa trotting to catch up. “Focusing heavily on blaster work. Some hand-to-hand, too. Piloting exercises for the ones you think need it.”  
  
“Understood, ma’am,” both Cara and Vespa said, the former with much more composure than the latter.  
  
“Close-range work, blaster pistols and the like,” Aleta elaborated, and Vespa nodded, her purple hair swishing around her ears. “Some knife work. See if we need to have more made before we get to Sakaar so that everyone on the ground can have one.”  
  
Cara’s fingers were already dancing over a holo-pad, her attention already absorbed in it as she navigated by a combination of using Aleta as a reference point and muscle memory of the _Sharpwing’s_ halls. Vespa, much slower on the uptake, produced her own holo-pad and started organizing what needed to be done.  
  
“We’re going to need to sort out who’s still injured from Vaikos and won’t be able to go, and set a rear guard to stay with the _Sharpwing_. See how many M-ships will be able to be ready by the time we get there, and set aside a portion of them to stay with the warship.”  
  
“Of course, Captain,” Cara said softly, as Vespa scrambled to keep up.  
  
“Tell the engineers to set aside that high-density steel alloy we picked up last time we were out by Xandar. We should still have quite a bit. I’m thinking of reinforcing the _Remora’s_ front end for ramming maneuvers.”  
  
The sound of fingers-against-holo-pad halved in complexity. “Ma’am, are you sure that’s wise? It could unbalance the ship, overload the engines-“  
  
“Vespa, I fucking _invented_ M-ships. I know what they can and can’t do.”  
  
“Yes, ma’am,” Vespa acknowledged quietly.  
  
“Do you mind going down to engineering, to take inventory in person? They aren’t the greatest at keeping the digital stocks accurate.”  
  
“Of course, Captain,” Vespa said sharply, pocketing the holo-pad and turning down a hall.  
  
As soon as the sound of Vespa’s footsteps couldn’t be heard anymore, Cara snorted softly, pulling up the weapons listings.  
  
“Yeah, they’re full of shit,” she verified, and Aleta shook her head in disappointment. “I know we didn’t come back from Vaikos with the same number of weapons we took there, but they haven’t changed the listing yet. They’ve had _days.”_  
  
Aleta sighed.  
  
“Remind me again, what it was you modelled the M-ships off of?”  
  
_Hope. Freedom. Salvation incarnate._  
  
“Gulls,” Aleta said quietly, her throat tight. “The sea-falcons and gulls that flew around the port.”  
  
_Green wings flashing over an orange sky, their songs mixing with the sound of the waves, their feathers splaying as they darted in the surf, the harsh pain of hunger in her gut and the soul-deep ache of loneliness in her chest, jealousy as she watched them soar, play, live free-_  
  
“The gulls were quick, and they had a tighter turn radius than any man-made ship, even accounting for size.” Her voice broke slightly; she coughed. “They could move each of their wing-feathers in a way a ship couldn’t move its flaps. I decided it was a much more efficient design than what was in style at the time.”  
  
_Nothing they had was going to help me, so I made something new._  
  
“They’ve come a long way since then,” Aleta half-joked. “Even the worst of our junkers is a far sight better than that first ship. New metal alloys, new technology, better techniques, you know how it goes.”  
  
_I built that first ship with my bare hands. It took me years. Now we can do it in a few days. Hours, if we really hustle at it._  
  
Cara hummed, intrigued, most of her attention still on the data-pad. “You’ll have to tell me more about the gulls, then, sometime,” she said, and raised her head, meeting Aleta’s gaze. “They sound fascinating.”  
  
_I named that first ship in their honor, and I named the Sharpwing in memory of that first ship._  
  
“Some night, when I’m much less sober than I am now,” Aleta murmured, and felt soothed by that calm, pity-free compassion Cara so easily gave. “It’s an interesting story, if a bit long.”  
  
“I’ll hold you to it,” Cara promised, and turned back to the data-pad.  
  
  
_**_  
  
It's later that she dreams.  
  
Looking backwards, not forwards, that is. She’d always had a knack for prophecy, and a good deal of Starhawk’s prescience had come from her, but this belonged firmly in the past.  
  
Why couldn’t it just _stay_ there?  
  
The ocean breeze rippled the curtains, the moonlight coming through. The scent of the sea soaked the air even this high up, in one of the pale towers in the city-on-the-bay.  
  
It had been millennia since the city’s primary focus had been ocean-faring ships. A spaceport loomed above, glimmering in the night sky, little landing craft glinting as they departed.  
  
She leaned out the window, the silvery dress billowing behind her in the wind. She watched the waves break on the shore, rocks standing out from the surf like so many teeth, hundreds of feet below.  
  
She leaned a little further out of the window, considered throwing herself into the water.  
  
That wasn’t her way. It never had been. She’d never shirked her duty, not even when she’d been young and afraid, when it had been more wrong than right, more pain than glory.  
  
Behind her, the door opened. She leaned back into the room, turned-  
  
-and Aleta wrenched herself awake.  
  
She sat up, nearly too quickly, sucking in a breath, letting it back out through clenched teeth.  
  
She was in her own quarters, on the _Sharpwing;_ she ran a hand over the edge of the bed, trying to pull herself back to the present.  
  
Terrible things happened to young girls across the universe, of course. Terrible things happened to _children_ and good people everywhere.  
  
That didn’t make it any easier to deal with.  
  
She shook her head, carding her fingers through her hair before she picked up the data-pad beside the bed. Might as well get something productive done, since she wasn’t going back to sleep anytime soon.  
  
She almost worried about cracking one of her molars when she saw the message from the Collector.  
  
_Forty-seven ships, dear? You could do it with three. They had your strongest missiles, I trust?  
  
I noticed an intriguing new addition on your husband’s crew- a rather unique Centaurian, perhaps? I’d love to learn more about him. And, of course, my offer regarding the Pluvian still stands. Could we make them into a package deal, perhaps?_  
  
She bared her teeth, fighting back the temptation to send him a simple _go fuck yourself and die in a fire,_ and collected herself enough to make a polite response.  
  
_I could do it with one ship, but I don’t do anything by halves, Taneleer. Have I ever?  
  
They weren’t even close to my strongest missiles.  
  
As always, I must decline your offer, and cannot tell you more about the Centaurian. They are not my crew, and it is not my place.  
  
_ She hit _send_ before she could convince herself to tack on _and if you ever mention wanting Martinex for your museum again, I’ll personally flay you,_ but it’s a near thing. It won’t be the last time he tries to buy Marty, won’t be the last time Tivan looks at him like a shiny jewel to be stolen. And then she’d have to flay him, and then they’d probably have to destroy Knowhere, and that would just be _so much mess…_  
  
Arcturans, as a culture, weren’t strangers to destroying Celestials. Well, _hadn’t_ been strangers, until…  
  
She closed her eyes.  
  
Until they’d all died.  
  
She tossed the data-pad onto her pillow; she sure as hell wasn’t getting any work done now. She hesitated for a moment, then pulled on her boots, her weapon-belt, her coat; it never hurt to be prepared. Better to overcompensate a thousand times than not have what you needed once.  
  
She’d learned that the hard way.  
  
_*_  
  
It was a bit of a walk to the _Sharpwing’s_ observation deck from her quarters, but it was worth it. There were several scattered over the ship, but this was the largest one. There weren’t any chairs in the room, just a few stairs running the length of it, leading down to the window that wrapped around the deck, the ceiling several inches of reinforced and alloyed glass, sloping down to form one of the walls.  
  
She settled in at the top of the stairs, laying flat, watching the stars blur as they whisked along at near-lightspeed. Some flicked by nearly too quick to see, others held out for a bit longer, and still others, unthinkably distant, barely moved, stationary points of light in the chaos.  
  
The view went yellow, then blue, then a thousand colors and then white; the _Sharpwing_ lurched as she went through a jump-point, the maneuver made less elegant than usual by her attachment to the _Valkyrie._ The stars reappeared, white and blue and yellow and red nestled in inky black, and now there was a few streaks of stellar nursery-clouds too. The _Sharpwing_ slowed noticeably, instruments auto-recalibrating; she felt the engines wind down, part of an automatic diagnostic run after every jump. Deep-space warp points were much less frequently used, thus less maintained, and hence much less stable than more central ones, making the ship and her crew both need time to settle after each passage.  
  
There was a flash of gold against the glass, and another, and a small, barely-audible bell-like sound as part of an asteroid made it through the shielding, bouncing away harmlessly.  
  
The _Sharpwing_ shifted slightly, then lurched as a particularly large asteroid hit somewhere portside and aft, by Aleta’s reckoning. It wasn’t enough turbulence to break anything, or even wake anybody except the lightest of sleepers. The shields would be able to protect the hull just fine.  
  
The _Sharpwing’s_ frame screeched under strain, nearly at the edge of her hearing, the sound reverberating into her skull as the _Valkyrie_ took what must have been a stronger hit, pulling the _Sharpwing_ along for the ride.  
  
She lifted her arm, tapped the screen of her wrist-comm, pinging the nighttime bridge crew.  
  
“Get three teams on the asteroid-cutting laser arrays,” she said tiredly, fairly sure there wasn’t enough light on the observation deck for whoever had picked up to see her face. “It feels like they’re mostly coming from the front and the left side. Don’t bother with the stations on the starboard side, the _Valkyrie_ will take care of incoming objects there. Put one on the bow, one on the portside bow, and the last one portside midship.”  
  
“Understood, Captain,” one of her officers replied sharply, and she heard the salute even through the staticky comm-line. “I apologize that it got to the point where it woke you. I should have posted the teams sooner, ma’am.”  
  
“Don’t let it happen again, then,” she sighed, and cut the line. It never hurt to keep the younger officers on their toes.  
  
She doesn’t have to flick through the directory this time; he’s right there in her recently-contacted list.  
  
“Sorry, can’t talk right now, bit busy,” Stakar says, and cuts the call before she even has time to look properly surprised.  
  
Surely the _Valkyrie_ hadn’t taken _that_ bad of a hit? The idea of it had a cold knot tightening at the base of her throat as she pushed herself to her feet, turning-  
  
-the wrist-comm beeped.  
  
_Meet me on the Valkyrie’s topmost observation deck in an hour?_  
  
The urgency drained from her.  
  
_Fuck, that’s a long walk,_ she thought, but typed _sure_ instead.  
  
  
_*_  
  
  
She passed crewmembers here and there on her way, green and blue-clad alike acknowledging her with either a nod or a salute and a murmured _captain_ as she went by. It said something, she was sure, that the _Valkyrie’s_ crew hailed her with the same respect the _Sharpwing’s_ did.  
  
She didn’t mind it at all, truth be told.  
  
It was dark on this observation deck, too, the only light the silvery glow of the stars, just enough to see details by if you’re of a standard diurnal race, which she used to approximate, and plenty if you’re a former soldier bioengineered for ability and endurance, which she is.  
  
She sat on the stairs this time instead of sprawling over them, taking in the view, and wasn’t there for long when the door opened behind her and she heard him crossing the room, and sensed more than heard the second presence behind him.  
  
She looked back over her shoulder, saw a red shimmer in the dark, silver light washing out blue skin, making the still-raw crosshatch of scars across his scalp shine white.  
  
She turned back to the stars.  
  
There was a soft crinkling sound as Stakar sat down beside her, close but not quite touching; he held out a silvery packet towards her. She reached in, barely looking over, fishing out something and tossing it in her mouth.  
  
She nearly smiled. Slightly sweet, the richness of wheat-protein, the fermented dough sticky once you broke through the cracker, the warm aftertaste of honey- Circajian honeycrisps, the closest thing to Arcturan honeybread they’d ever found.  
  
It brought back memories of sitting on the cliffs, their legs dangling over the side, sharing bread after a long day of training and tutoring. Circajians made it into little bite-sized chunks and all sorts of other forms, but the real thing had come in a loaf big enough for two to tear apart and share.  
  
There was a slight rustle as the boy cautiously settled in on the other side of Stakar, a careful distance away. Without looking, Stakar offered the packet in that direction, too, and after a tense moment, there was a soft crinkling as the boy took one.  
  
Stakar took one for himself, and she could hear the crisp crunching between his teeth as he offered her the packet again.  
  
It went on like that for awhile, the sweetness of the honey reminding her of the good things of home that had countered the bad, no words exchanged between them, stars drifting overhead. She looked back when the door opened again, ignoring Yondu’s visible flinch; Martinex held his hands up, closing the door behind him with a soft _click_ and coming to sit at her side.  
  
She took the bag of crisps from Stakar, offering it; he dipped his head in thanks as he hunted for one, and offered her a bottle in return.  
  
She pulled the cork with her teeth, spat it out, took a taste; Contraxian whiskey, dark and smoky, this one leaving a warm fuzz in her throat. She passed it to Stakar, along with the crisp-bag, and after he’d sampled the whiskey for himself both bottle and bag went down the line to Yondu, who flinched at the taste of the whiskey, inspected the crisp-bag, and tried to pass both back.  
  
“Go ahead and finish it,” Stakar said, taking the whiskey but not the bag, breaking the warm silence that had come to envelop the room.  
  
Yondu shook his head. “This one has-“  
  
_“Sahi,”_ Aleta corrected, her voice a touch rough from disuse.  
  
She felt Stakar stiffen; the silence turned slightly electric.  
  
“It’s in a language that’s not in the pan-galactic translator archives,” she explained, taking the whiskey from Stakar and having some more for herself before passing it to Marty. “One of a dozen or so dialects we paid to have stricken from the records, so there’s not a chip out there that can decode it. Only people that can understand it are in this room. _Sahi_ refers to the self as not part of a whole, as an individual. It means _I,_ basically,” she rambled, dipping into Middle Xandarian at the end to avoid the class-tinged pronouns that would’ve come through in translated Kree.  
  
_You started it, giving him the honeycrisps,_ she thought at Stakar, his vaguely-shocked silence louder than words. _If you’re going to give him the culture, give him the language too._  
  
Marty nudged her knee with the bottle; she took it, passed it on to Stakar without taking any since she’d stolen his previous share, and there was a soft crinkling sound as the boy finished off the crisps.  
  
_Welcome to the Too Fucked Up to Sleep Club,_ Aleta thought dryly, and almost laughed. _Highly exclusive. We have an observation deck, honeycrisps, dead languages, and whiskey._  
  
She leaned into Stakar, watching the stars reflect off of Marty’s face, silver specks against the soft red glow of Yondu’s implant.  
  
_And the company’s pretty great, too._  
  
  
_*_  
  
  
It becomes something of a routine on the way to Sakaar; sometimes there’s an asteroid field, sometimes there’s a solar storm, sometimes there’s nothing at all, but either way, they meet on the observation deck at some point well into the night cycle.  
  
Stakar brings Yondu and the crisps, Marty brings whatever alcohol he can drag up, and she brings the vocabulary.  
  
“Your accent is awful when you’re drunk,” Stakar complains, taking the whiskey from her; Martinex laughs. “It’s _siva,_ not _zhiva._ ”  
  
She steals the crisp-bag from him.  
  
“Like you don’t have the same damn accent when you’re drunk, too.”  
  
“I don’t drop my s’s to z’s as profoundly as you do.”  
  
“Bullshit. You just get too shitfaced to remember it. Or,” there’s a bright glint in her eye, “you know, sometimes you just have other things on your mind and it slips out-“  
  
“I don’t wanna think about that,” Marty says weakly, and this time it’s her turn to laugh.  
  
  
_*  
  
  
_ Most of the time, though, they sit in near-silence punctuated by the occasional crunch of a honeycrisp or the slosh of liquid in a bottle pilfered from Stakar’s personal stores.  
  
She didn’t mind that, either.  
  
  
_**  
  
_  
Charlie met them eighteen jumps out from Sakaar; they could have done it closer, but as some militaristic planets liked to monitor the space out to fifteen jumps from their homeworld, it was better to stay in one place far enough out to not be noticed. She doubted Sakaarans really had the technology or the manpower to watch to even five jumps out, but better safe than sorry.  
  
Sakaarans had yet to even independently _invent_ jump-capable ships, but the Kree had plenty.  
  
“Well, if this is the welcome I get, I should come around more often,” Charlie remarked, walking down the dock besides his M-ship. She was a lovely thing, although radically different from the fine forms and agile bearing of the _Remora;_ this one was built firstly for Charlie to actually be able to walk around in her comfortably, and secondly as a fighter. The required interior space turned her more into a bulky heavy-hitter than a fast-moving darter, but she did it well.  
  
It’d been a little tricky to design, but nothing too difficult.  
  
“Is this a new one, then?” Aleta called, gesturing at the ship, eyeing the splash of pale yellow in the shape of a Ravager flame around the cockpit window, the color darkening in waves to hit the wingtips at a warm red-orange.

She wondered if she could have ever loved her homeworld enough, even without all that had happened, to pick the color of its sky as her signature color the way Charlie had honored his home with his.  
  
The tragedy of it was that she probably could have, if it hadn’t been for everything else.  
  
“Aye, she is,” Charlie verified, and she heard a soft _clang_ against the floor of the hangar bay as his second hopped off of the loading ramp, out of her line of sight. Charlie had already nearly reached her; sometimes she envied the length of his stride. “I call her the _Stormcloud._ Same build and design as you gave me, just scaled up a little, and more legroom in the front.”  
  
She grimaced. “Sorry ‘bout that.”  
  
“Ah, don’t be,” he said, putting a hand on her shoulder- or, more accurately, around most of her shoulder. “That was a good ship. Was a Kree Accuser, what brought her down.”  
  
“Damn.” She took a breath through her teeth. “Did you get him back for it?”  
  
“Sure as hell did.” He waved his hand back towards the _Stormcloud_ as his second came up around her bow. “Kai got him for me, since I couldn’t.”  
  
“Good on him, then.”  
  
She reached up, loosely hooked her hand on his forearm. “It’s good to see you again,” she said softly. “Hasn’t been the same around here, without you hitting your head on everything. I think they’re starting to get some of the dents out of the doorframes in the lower levels.”  
  
He laughed at that, and she joined in. Things had always been easy between them; she’d never feared him, something that couldn’t be said even for Stakar.  
  
“Hey, _asshole,”_ came the announcing cry of another entrant into the hangar bay, quick steps echoing across the floor.  
  
“Martinex _fucking_ T’Naga,” Charlie shouted back, making her squint at the sound as he removed his hand from her shoulder and crossed the bay.  
  
She rolled her eyes, then offered a smile to Charlie’s first mate.  
  
“Good to see you, too,” she offered as he made his way to her, light as a cat. Kai- _Kaivosonadriskova Safraxos_ in full but that was just _way_ too fucking long to say more than once a decade- had the certain skill of travelling in damn near totally silence when he wanted to, something he’d told her he’d picked up in the jungles on Centauri IV.  
  
_Shit,_ she realized suddenly, but kept her expression pleasant.  
  
“The pleasure’s all mine, Captain Aleta,” he said suavely, and stood at attention before her for a moment before tapping his fist above his heart, bowing his head. Damn if he wasn’t a fine specimen, too, nearly every inch of him hard muscle, bright ruby eyes, facial features pretty enough to make girls across the galaxy swoon, vibrant red crest going nearly two feet above his head and continuing down his back, his leathers cut away to let it have space on its path along his spine. Even without the _tahlei,_ he still had a good foot on her, maybe a foot and a half.  
  
“I trust you had no trouble during your return from Andromeda?” she queried, switching over to Kai’s native dialect of Centaurian as they walked back towards Charlie and Martinex, who were engaging in their usual game of eagle-and-sparrow playfighting.  
  
Centaurian was like singing; the meaning was in the melody and the tone, the rhythm calling back to rainforests and murmuring rivers, a song meant to ring across a landscape instead of echoing down metal halls.  
  
Aleta had always loved music.  
  
“Oh, nothing we couldn’t handle,” Kai said easily, shortening his stride to keep pace with hers, adjusting the ever-present golden bow slung around his shoulder, nearly as long from end to end as she was tall. “Speaking of which, I’m sorry about what happened to you on Vaikos. If we’d been there-“  
  
She raised a hand to silence him. “Then you would’ve lost crew just the same as we did. It was a surprise attack. They caught us completely unawares. It was a slaughter.”  
  
“How many did you lose, if you don’t mind my asking?”  
  
“Four hundred and thirty-eight.” The words still tasted like poison, no matter what language she said them in.  
  
“Anthos above,” Kai breathed, his step faltering. He made a soft trilling sound, deep in his throat, that had no literal meaning, but expressed a profound sorrow, profound loss. “That’s what, a ten percent loss for you?”  
  
“Give or take a couple of points, yeah.”  
  
“Why didn’t you hail us? Or Mainframe or Krugarr? We would have come, you know we would-“  
  
“Never had time. We thought it was just a recon and collect mission, so everyone was spread out. I never even managed to get my own crew to rally to a single point, much less send off an interstellar transmission.”  
  
A soft rush of air buffeted her as Kai shook his head in dismay. “If-“  
  
“If I’d posted a watch, if I’d posted a rearguard, if I’d had M-ships in orbit, if I’d had a crew watching the sky for interlopers, if I’d trained them better they wouldn’t be dead, yeah, I _know,”_ she snapped, lapsing back into her everyday trade-dialect of Arcturan that _was_ in the pangalactic translator archives. “I know, okay? I’ve thought about it plenty.”  
  
“I was _going_ to say that if there’s anything you need, don’t be afraid to ask Charlie and I. I know you take it hard when you lose crew, especially like that. Do you need any extra hands?”  
  
“No,” she sighed, the tension going out of her shoulders. “It was bad, but it was no Khyno Rhee. We’ll be fine until we get to a good recruiting port. Thank you, though,” she tacked on in Centaurian again.  
  
After Khyno Rhee, the four warships had been so short on crew that they’d had to dock them together, the _Valkyrie_ and _Sharpwing_ linked through the built-in docks they had, and Krugarr’s _Serpentine_ and Mainframe’s _Circuitry_ joined with holo-bridges reinforced with hastily built steel walls. It’d been unwieldy as hell, four warships glued together into a square like that, but they’d had no choice but to pool engineers and crew to even be able to operate. Even then, most of the command decisions had come down from the _Valkyrie’s_ bridge, partially because the _Circuitry’s_ had been destroyed.  
  
Absolutely _blessedly,_ the moment was broken by Stakar coming into the hangar.  
  
“Charlie, for God’s sake, don’t break my first mate,” he called, and Aleta smiled. “Have you stolen my wife already?”  
  
“I don’t like looking that far up to make eye contact,” she called back, making her way to him.  
  
“Gives me a cramp in my neck,” she elaborated, lightly nudging him with her elbow, mindful of the silvery-gold loops above his shoulders. _There’s something here that concerns me, see what you think,_ went the unspoken cue.  
  
His brow furrowed thoughtfully for a second as he looked, and then she saw the understanding.  
  
“I see,” he said quietly, and then more loudly- “Marty, he outweighs you by a factor of nine, you stars-damned fool-”  
  
“Gotcha,” Martinex proclaimed, brandishing something shiny in his hand and prancing out of Charlie’s reach. “I win.”  
  
“Goddamnit,” Charlie muttered. “I’ll have you know, I’ve had a long trip-“  
  
_“Enough,”_ Stakar sighed, shaking his head. “You two can fight it out later. Mainframe’s on her way, and I don’t want to be the one to explain to her just _why_ she was kept waiting. She’s still plenty pissed about what the Collector did.”  
  
“What did the Collector do?” Charlie asked, momentarily distracted.  
  
“Do we have to go blow up Knowhere after this?” Kai wondered, tilting his head and seeming none too opposed to the concept.  
  
“Just for the record, blowing up Knowhere has my vote,” Aleta added.  
  
“We are _not_ blowing up Knowhere,” Stakar said exasperatedly as Martinex grinned. “The Collector’s the one paying us.”  
  
“We could take the jewels and sell them to someone else,” Martinex suggested.  
  
“We can have this discussion _later,”_ Stakar hissed. “Come _on.”_  
  
  
_**_  
  
  
To avoid the cities, they came at the mountains from the northeast, over the sea; there were extensive radar stations on the southwestern side of the volcano, the capitol on the plains to the southeast, the mountains sticking up like jagged teeth at the terminal end of the bay.  
  
They were really still in orbit and not all the way through the atmosphere, but the radar stations could certainly reach that far.  
  
“Those all look shiny and new,” she commented into her radio.  
  
“Favors from the Kree,” Stakar hedged. “Making them think the alliance is worth it when they’ll just be cannon fodder. The Grandmaster kept the whole place a shithole except for his city, and now the Kree are helping civilize the rest of it.”  
  
“The Grandmaster?” Cara queried, voice staticky, and Aleta made a mental note to upgrade the _Ascarnion’s_ comm-system.  
  
“He owns the whole place,” Stakar explained. “Keeps the whole planet under his thumb. Basically has the entirety of the Sakaaran race as his personal slaves.”  
  
“And I’d really much rather not see him,” Aleta said shortly, easing back on the _Remora’s_ throttle in preparation for the transition to in-atmo operations.  
  
“He’s off planet,” Stakar reassured her, and she could see the _Siren’s_ engines winding back, same as the _Remora’s._ “Tivan made sure of it before he sent us here.”  
  
“Ain’t they brothers, or some shit?” Martinex asked.  
  
“Yeah, they are,” Stakar confirmed.  
  
“So we’re mediating a sibling rivalry,” Mainframe concluded. “Seriously? Thirteen million units for this shit?”  
  
“Hey, the pay’s great,” Stakar defended.  
  
She looked over again, watched as Martinex’s ship, the _Obsidian,_ looped over the _Siren’s_ right wing to hover comfortably directly overhead.  
  
“I thought there were only outposts on the southern half of the mountains,” Aleta commented, frowning slightly at the glint of metal on the sea side of the range.  
  
“That’s what the maps we were given said,” Stakar said warily.  
  
“And what we were given also said there weren’t any surface-to-air missiles beyond a class two,” Aleta added. “The ships we brought can take up to a class four, minimum, but those launcher arrays down there look like they can fire class eights.”  
  
“Maybe they haven’t gotten the missiles in yet?” Martinex asked hopefully.  
  
“Sure, Marty, and Thanos hands out free puppies on Tuesdays.” Aleta rolled her eyes, flicking the comm-system over to a private frequency.  
  
“Can you cover me if I go down to check out those launchers?”  
  
“Of course, Captain,” Cara replied smoothly, and she could hear the _Ascarnion’s_ turbines winding up in preparation. “Ready when you are.”  
  
She flicked the comm-system back to the captains’ channel.  
  
“I’m going down to check out that station on the north side,” Aleta announced, and pushed the _Remora_ into a dive before Stakar could object. A thin wisp of smoke, like a warning, threaded from the volcano in the middle of the mountain range, winding east; she tacked slightly west, compensating for the wind.  
  
“Fuck’s sake, Aleta,” Stakar snapped, and on her radar she watched the _Siren_ turn to follow.  
  
The mountains rapidly increased in size as she descended, going from tiny little shark’s-teeth to looming spires, the open mouth of the volcano nearly four miles across.  
  
“I see why they call it the Maw now,” Cara murmured, and Aleta nodded in agreement, even though Cara couldn’t see.  
  
She looped around, out over the sea, burning up altitude to come at the volcano straight on for the second pass.  
  
“Yeah, those aren’t class two launchers,” Aleta verified, pulling up to buzz the mountainside. “Kree-issue, multi-use, variable-geometry.”  
  
She levelled out for a moment, circling in front of the northern face of the mountain again.  
  
There was a bright flash, down below; she had just a moment to whisk the _Remora_ in front of the _Ascarnion_ before the ship lurched suddenly, nearly throwing her out of her seat as a missile hit the _Remora’s_ underside, loud as thunder. She glimpsed the _Ascarnion_ diving below her and turning back towards the volcano, right before her head hit the edge of her instrument array none too delicately, and she snarled several rather foul Arcturan curses as she gave the engines more power and turned back towards the ocean, her comm-system damn near overloading from so many people hailing her at once.  
  
“I’m fine, I’m _fine,_ just hit my head,” she hissed, swiping her hand above her right eyebrow and swearing again when it came back stained pale violet with her blood. There was the sound of another explosion, further back, and then the _Ascarnion’s_ mark on the radar turned back and started following her.  
  
“They won’t be troubling us again,” Cara announced.  
  
“So, they have Kree-issue class tens,” Aleta rejoined, idling noting how the impact had thrown the _Remora_ nearly six hundred feet higher in the air.  
  
“Now we’re duty-bound to sterilize the whole damn mountain,” Charlie commented, almost sounding put-upon.  
  
“Sounds like a plan to me,” Stakar said, his voice dark with the promise of violence, and she banked the _Remora_ to watch the _Siren_ sweep past the volcano, fire blooming like a flower on the rocks in her wake.  
  
Aleta grinned, and licked blood off her lips.  
  
“Save some for me,” she called, coming back up along the shoreline. The sea churned grey down below, the beaches entirely ash except for the parts closest to the water. On one hand, the ash would be hell on the turbines, but on the other hand, it was a nice, soft substrate for an emergency landing, if one was needed.  
  
The _Remora’s_ engines and various systems all seemed to be running normally; the air pressure hadn’t even fluctuated. It felt like the missile had hit in front of the cargo hold and loading ramp, which really, in the big scheme of things, weren’t _that_ important.  
  
She made another sweeping pass, got her pound of flesh by throwing one of her own missiles into an outpost, settled the Remora into a hover so she could watch it turn to rubble.  
  
The volcano snarled back, and ash mixed with the smoke billowing from the top.  
  
“You know,” Aleta said conversationally, reaching over the edge of her armrest to prime a set of switches, “I think a couple of hard blows might trigger that thing back into erupting. Could give us a nice bit of cover, keep the Kree from sending in any ships after us.”  
  
There was a sharp _beep_ from her comm-screen. Aleta tilted her head, waited for the text-to-voice interface to kick in.  
  
Thing sounded like a mediocre hotel kiosk, not a proper robot. She supposed that was reason number fourteen to make the Bhakatta run. Not that she needed that many, of course.  
  
_“I could do whatever I pleased with the volcano if you’d just give me a window to do it.”_ Somehow, even through two layers of interpretation, he managed to sound snarky.  
  
“There’ll be time for that later,” Aleta reassured him, idly swiping blood away from her eye as she ran a series of calibrations, listening to the whine of electric motors as they pulled a pair of the heavier missiles on board down from storage and into the loading chutes, one missile for each wing. “Are we clear for blowing this bitch up?”  
  
She couldn’t see the _Siren,_ but she knew Stakar was rubbing at his forehead, shaking his head slightly. “Yeah,” he grumbled, “go ahead, blow the bitch up.”  
  
“You have an eighty-six percent chance of success if you target the fissure in the northeastern face,” Mainframe chimed in. “I could assist, if you like-“  
  
“Nah,” Aleta interrupted, her voice icy behind the friendly veneer. “I have a personal issue with the Grandmaster. I’d like to ruin his picturesque seaside as much as I can.”  
  
“Shit, why didn’t you just _say_ so?” Charlie scoffed. “Come on, Kai, let’s go to ground. This is gonna get messy.”  
  
She lightly tapped a button on her left armrest. The _Remora_ bucked slightly from the recoil of the missiles, which looked _ever_ so lovely as they burrowed into Mainframe’s suggested fissure, then liberated a generous amount of rock from the mountainside. The volcano rumbled, and redoubled its efforts to turn night into day.  
  
Small flakes of ash flickered past the _Remora’s_ viewing window, line-of-sight distance rapidly decreasing. Aleta took her chances, turned the _Remora_ back towards the capitol even though the Grandmaster supposedly wasn’t there.  
  
_Go to hell,_ she thought towards the idea of him. _Maybe there you’ll find a fraction of the pain you caused the rest of us._  
  
She exhaled sharply, and turned her ship back towards the volcano just in time to watch the _Obsidian_ fly through a cloud of pumice.  
  
“Oh, for fuck’s sake, Marty,” she cried out. “Are you _blind?”_  
  
“What’s the idiot gone and done now?” Stakar questioned.  
  
“Oh, just gone and put his ship right through a pumice cloud,” Aleta said as she watched golden sparks trail from the _Obsidian’s_ engines. The turbines were dust of dust now, she was sure, and judging by the flames just barely peeking out from behind the engine casings, the fuel injection system was the consistency of a fishing net too. The ship’s body didn’t look too great, either, but it was intact.  
  
He had enough altitude to glide wherever he pleased, at least.  
  
“Okay, so, that may not have been the _best_ move I’ve ever made,” Martinex admitted.  
  
“Go put in further up the shore,” Stakar ordered. “Unless you don’t remember _how?”_  
  
“Of-fucking- _course_ I know how to do a landing with both engines gone, Captain,” Martinex said sourly, every word sounding like he was biting into a lemon. “I’ve had to drill it enough, that’s for damn sure.”  
  
Aleta tilted her head, flicked back to the private channel between her and Cara.  
  
“Was that your doing?”  
  
“He lost a bet against me in the orloni races, so I put him on the drill roster,” Cara explained.  
  
“And just _why_ are we keeping orloni around long enough to train them to run race tracks?”  
  
“Oh, no, we’re breeding them specially for it. They’re faster and they come in different colors, got bigger sails. I’ve got this trio I like, a blue and a purple and a green, they almost always do well and it was the green one who won the bet against Marty for me.”  
  
There was a soft whine from the hydraulic system as the _Remora’s_ landing gear extended. “What color green?”  
  
“Pale, like fresh Xandarian grass in the spring.”  
  
Just above the surface, she cut the engines as far back as they could go without stalling, trying to minimize the amount of dust stirred up. In the moment before touchdown, she killed them completely, letting the _Remora_ drop the last several feet unceremoniously and sink into her shock-absorbers.  
  
Little bit rough on the suspension, hell of a lot easier on the turbines.  
  
“Switching over to wrist-comm,” Aleta announced on the captains’ channel, then shut off the comm-system.  
  
She put in the command to lower the loading ramp, passing through the in-hall armory on her way through and grabbing a plasma rifle that moonlighted as anti-aircraft artillery. Two could play that game.  
  
On her way out, she hit the close-command on the keypad next to the ramp, and jumped down into the ash.  
  
She primed the rifle, pulling it close and sighting down the barrel, looking out into the near-pitch blackness of the volcanic cloud. She inhaled softly, smelling burnt rock and hot metal and ash and ship exhaust.  
  
She reached for the light, feeling its absence in the shape of silhouettes and the dimness of the cloud- the darkness wasn’t absolute inside of it, yet, and she could sense a ship lurking in it, coming towards them.  
  
“So is it just races, or do you have them do any sort of obstacle courses too?”  
  
“Oh, when there gets to be too many of them, we set up fights,” Cara said enthusiastically, her steps kicking up puffs of ash, spots of void in the light-field. “Hey- are you okay, actually? That cut looks nasty.”  
  
“I’m fine.”  
  
“Should I go back and grab a rifle, too?”  
  
“Nah.” Aleta tracked the rifle slightly to her right, following the ship in the cloud. “Stay here for a moment.”  
  
She sensed, rather than saw, Cara tilting her head. “If I might ask why, Captain?”  
  
“Call it intuition,” Aleta murmured, bringing the rifle back to the left. “Or…”  
  
It was in range now.  
  
She fired, felt her collarbone and shoulder flex with the recoil of the gun, and lowered it to watch the shot disappear into the cloud.  
  
The Kree ship tumbled out of it, wreathed in golden fire, falling directly towards where they stood. There had been a roughly three-in-five chance of it going that way.  
  
Aleta waited a moment, watched it fall; there was something beautiful about the silver ship streaking like a comet, tumbling end over end, the shriek of high-pressure air through torn steel-  
  
Cara pulled harshly at her sleeve, urgent. “Captain,” she breathed, “Captain, we have to move, come on, let’s _go-“_  
  
“This is my favorite M-ship,” Aleta chided her softly. “I’d be awfully heartbroken if something were to happen to her.”  
  
She raised her hand, and a wall of solid golden light snapped into existence a few hundred feet overhead, just in time for the Kree fighter-craft to slam into it. She grinned, baring her teeth, feeling the light fill in behind the ship as it turned into a pancake with an explosion she felt in her bones.  
  
Cara’s hands slackened on her sleeve; when Aleta looked over at her, her head was turned up towards the sky, watching the fireball rise, eyes wide and jaw slack with awe.  
  
“Or,” Aleta repeated, “you could call it some more of that _elder species fuckery,_ as you’re so fond of doing.”  
  
She put her attention back on the former ship, forming the light-wall into more of a slight bowl, then pitched it harshly enough to throw the ship back into the sky, back towards the mountains. Wherever it ended up, it’d fuck up something hostile along the way, she was sure.  
  
And then she let the wall dissolve.  
  
“Nice shot,” Stakar called, coming towards her and holding a rifle of his own. She caught a glimpse of a flash of red, dark blue on lighter blue, the boy hiding in his captain’s shadow. Ah, she’d probably frightened him.  
  
“Thanks,” she shouted back, still grinning, Cara still loosely holding on to her jacket. She gently pulled herself free, pressing the rifle into Cara’s hands before walking over to Stakar.  
  
“We’ll just blame Krugarr for that one if Tivan asks, yeah?” Aleta asked.  
  
“Sure thing.” He frowned at her for a moment, then reached out, rubbing at the cut above her brow with his sleeve. “You alright?” he asked softly.  
  
She rolled her eyes. “I’ll let you check me over in the med-bay after this if it means you won’t nag me for the next twenty hours about having a concussion.”  
  
“Fair enough.” He hefted the rifle. “Wanna tag-team the next one?”  
  
_“Hell_ yes.”  
  
“Ground forces will be on their way soon. Should be fun.”  
  
“Should be,” Aleta agreed.  
  
“With all due respect, ma’am,” Yondu cut in, “this one-“  
  
“Ask,” she told him.  
  
“How did you know where the ship was, and where it would fall?”  
  
She wondered for a moment at why he thought _that_ was the most confusing aspect; maybe he could rationalize the light as being related to Krugarr’s mandalas? Maybe he thought the light had come from Krugarr in the first place, and it’d just been a good bit of teamwork?  
  
“Well, son,” Stakar started-  
  
“You could call it intuition,” Aleta continued, saving the drawn-out explanation for when they weren’t in the middle of an _active goddamn battlefield-_  
  
“It’s elder species fuckery,” Cara shouted, raising her own rifle. “And don’t let them tell you otherwise!”  
  
  
_**  
  
_  
Later, when the bulk of the fighting was done (with the help of a _great_ deal of elder-species-fuckery from both her and Stakar and Krugarr), she made her way to the _Obsidian._  
  
“So I see your escape hatch got crushed shut.”  
  
“Yeah, it did,” Martinex whined over her wrist-comm, and he was nearly vibrating with pent-up energy. “If you could get me out of here, that would be _great.”_  
  
She stood still.  
  
He sighed. “That would be great, _Captain.”_  
  
“That’s better.” She jumped up onto the _Obsidian’s_ snout, walking up to the glass viewport and sitting in front of it.  
  
“What’s your beef with the Grandmaster, anyway?”  
  
“I knew him when I lived on Arcturus, before the war. I don’t have particularly pleasant memories of him.”  
  
“Oh?”  
  
“I met him several times before I went to Teraji,” she finished shortly, and watched him flinch, eyes going from dull gold to pale blue.  
  
“Shit, Aleta, I’m sorry,” he murmured.  
  
“You know,” she commented, unsubtly changing the topic as she looked out over the grey sea, “I think you could stand to sit in there for a bit longer, think about just what you did to end up in this situation.”  
  
_“Captain-“_  
  
She lifted her hands so he could see, made eye contact, and turned off her wrist-comm.  
  
He hammered his fist against the inside of the viewport; she mostly succeeded at keeping a straight face.  
  
It wasn’t a bad place to watch the sunset from, so she did exactly that. Closer to the volcano, the ash-plain between the mountains and the sea lit up with artificial light as the search for the gems started in earnest.  
  
The sun was half below the horizon when she saw Cara up further along the shore, waving a hand high above her head, then starting towards the _Obsidian_ at a jog.  
  
Aleta inhaled sharply, then focused, taking stock of the sun’s last weak rays, pulling them in and weaving them solid again, forming a crowbar.  
  
She stuck it into the problem spot along the edge of the _Obsidian’s_ viewport, and with a sharp yank of her arm, pulled the metal back into form.  
  
The glass dome rose with a soft _hiss,_ and Marty nearly launched himself out of the ship with a burst of expletives, but she was already a third of the way down the beach by the time he’d cleared the cockpit, the crowbar long gone.  
  
“Well?” Aleta demanded, as soon as they met.  
  
“Thought you’d want to hear,” Cara panted, and yet her eyes were bright, a smile on her face- “All the pilots completed their check-ins. All of them. And everyone they brought, too.”  
  
Aleta’s eyes widened. “You mean-“  
  
“We didn’t lose anybody.” She grabbed Aleta’s shoulders, almost seeming dizzy with delight. “Not a _single one!”  
  
_ Neither of them were quite sure how it happened, but they ended up in each other’s arms, keeping each other from falling over, the sound of their breathless laughter filling the beach.  
  
Not a single one lost-  
  
_-not a single one!_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> No sooner did I pick Sakaar for the setting of this chapter that the Thor: Ragnarok trailer came and used Sakaar as a place setting and gave a name and a role on Sakaar to a character I'd planned to introduce about fifteen chapters from now. :|
> 
> I swear, I didn't intentionally do the themed names for all of the captains' ships, it just happened that way. Stakar's is mythology, Aleta's is natural creatures, Krugarr's is reptiles, Mainframe's is tech, and Charlie's is storms. I'm about two chapters away from having to make a chart to keep everything straight.
> 
> Please leave comments! :)


	4. Interlude 1: On Gods, the Nova Corps, and Ravager History (Caraginei I)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Interlude 1: The First Mates; Caraginei Obfonteri, Martinex T'Naga, Kaivosonadriskova Safraxos

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Can planet-bound gods reach into the stars?

“So how’s little Kraglin doing?”  
  
She fished around in the drawer, finding the knife she was looking for and tossing it across the room to Kai.  
  
“He’s doing good. Getting taller, taking after his daddy. He seems to be pretty far over on the slow-maturing side of the spectrum, physically at least.”  
  
Kai tilted his head thoughtfully. “Probably some weird hybrid thing. Xandarians grow pretty slow, don’t they?”  
  
She pulled out two more knives, nudged the drawer shut with her hip. They were in a small dining room that could seat six, maybe, an auxiliary to a small kitchen suitable for cooking for just that many.   
  
“Yeah, they do,” she confirmed, going to the table and setting out the cutlery. “On the other end of it, Hraxians grow fast. He seems to be lagging behind the Xandarian standards, so far.”  
  
“Weird hybrid thing,” Kai reaffirmed, nodding thoughtfully. “He’s what, quarter Hraxian?”  
  
“On his papa’s side,” Cara verified.   
  
“Is he gonna get that second set of teeth Hraxians have, you think? Did his father have them?”  
  
“Sure did. Could do that spine-ripping trick that Hraxians do. I think Kraglin’s are just starting to come in.”  
  
It still hurt, just a bit, to think about Jagar, about love lost in the Siege of Syvox Three.   
  
Martinex stuck his head out of the kitchen. “Meat’s almost ready, Cara, if you want to do anything else?”  
  
“Coming,” she told him, dusting her hands off on her shirt, her jacket hanging off the back of one of the chairs.   
  
“You guys didn’t have to go to all this trouble,” Kai stressed, following her into the kitchen as she went to the oven, peering in.  
  
“It’s no trouble, really,” she said.   
  
“At least let me help with something?”  
  
“Ain’t really much to help with,” Martinex said, going to the fridge and pulling out a bottle of something that was of unsure origin but definite quality. “Meat’s almost done, side dishes are done, I’ve already gone and stolen booze from Stakar…”  
  
“When are you _not_ stealing booze from Stakar?” Cara wondered.  
  
“Look, he hardly ever drinks most of the stuff, just lets it sit around and collect dust ‘cause he likes to look at it. I always feel bad snatching from Aleta’s stores because she actually goes through it, ya know?”  
  
“She shares with me,” Cara informed him, closing the oven and reaching up for the cupboards, pulling out three glasses.  
  
“The pot’s getting higher on those two, Kai, if you want in,” Martinex said. “Zalka, one of Stakar’s pilots, saw them all over each other on the beach on Sakaar, and the odds are getting juicier.”  
  
“Oh?” Kai followed them back out to the table. “Tell me more.”  
  
“Oh my _God,_ Marty.”  
  
“So it’s down to two camps, really, with a whole bunch of different factions in the two,” Marty explained as she laid out the glasses, and he filled them. “First camp says they’re gonna get together, and the divisions are on just _how._ Second camp says Stakar’s a jealous bastard, and nothing’s gonna happen ‘cause he don’t wanna share. Factions in that one are fighting over just _how_ he keeps it from happening.”  
  
She felt her cheeks burning with heat, and hid her face in her hands.  
  
“Marty,” she groaned, positively _mortified._  
  
“And what do you think?” Kai asked, intrigued.  
  
“I think I’m waiting for an order to put a tracker on the _Remora_ so we know where these two get married,” Marty said, grinning devilishly. “My money’s on them doing it on Xandar, _if_ they do, and they’re gonna hook up _way_ before that. My _big_ money’s on them doing it right after a battle, ‘cause you _know_ how Aleta gets all jittery after a good fight. Captain’s quarters. On the _Sharpwing_. And-“  
  
She cuffed him sharply on the back of his head, and he burst into laughter. So did Kai.  
  
She went back into the kitchen, checked the oven again.   
  
“Meat’s ready,” she announced, and watched Kai’s head whip around towards her as he caught the scent.  
  
“Is that laukha?” he asked, coming back into the kitchen as she pulled the roast out of the oven.  
  
She hummed in affirmation.  
  
“Oh, you _really_ shouldn’t have,” he said, but he was nearly beside himself with excitement.  
  
“I’ve never met a Centaurian that didn’t love laukha,” she explained simply, letting the roast settle for a moment while she went hunting for a carving knife.   
  
“And how many Centaurians have you _met,_ dear?”  
  
“Well, two now,” she supposed. “And I don’t actually know if the other one likes laukha, so scratch that earlier statement. I _do_ know it’s your favorite. Marty, grab the sides, would you?”   
  
“I _thought_ that new kid with Stakar was Centaurian,” Kai said vindictively. “I haven’t had a chance to get within a few hundred feet of him yet. He’s got the look of one of the mountain tribes. I can sense him, but just barely. I wonder if he can sense me?”  
  
“That’s beyond my pay grade,” Cara answered, nudging the oven shut with her hip, picking up the roast-pan and carrying it to the table. “Stakar could probably give you a good answer on that one.”  
  
“Or, y’know, you could just, like, _ask the kid himself,”_ Martinex muttered, setting down the plate of sides- bread, cheese, crackers, those little crunchy aquatic arthropods from the sea-moons of Selana.  
  
“He hardly talks to anybody,” Cara said, sitting down and claiming a handful of the little crabs before Marty could.  
  
“Of course he doesn’t, he’s fucking _terrified,_ all the time,” Marty explained, reaching over and counter-stealing crabs as soon as he sat down, while Kai started cutting into the laukha roast. “Kid’s used to getting whipped for speaking when not spoken to.”  
  
“What is it that Aleta likes to call it, when someone wrongs you or someone you like and you’re honor-bound to pay it back?” Kai asked absently, cutting off a significant chunk of the roast and setting it on his plate.  
  
“A blood debt,” Cara informed him, eating a few of the crabs like popcorn and humming in satisfaction. “It’s like, someone came and fucked with you, so now you gotta go fuck with them four times harder to make up for it. I think it’s an Arcturan thing.”  
  
“Then there’s a blood debt, owed between that boy and the Kree,” Kai said darkly. “What they did to him, taking his crest like that…” He reached up, rubbed at the base of his _tahlei._ “It’d be like… like if I shaved you, cauterized your scalp, and tattooed all of your skin blue. And even then it wouldn’t be the same, because you’d still be able to do everything you used to. The crest is how we have our telepathy, how we sense each other, what makes a Centaurian a Centaurian and not Kree. I can’t think of a higher crime, of a worse violation, than that.”  
  
He cut off a piece of laukha with more force than necessary, bit down harshly.  
  
“By _Anthos,_ Cara, you’ve outdone yourself,” Kai murmured.  
  
“Yeah,” Marty agreed, having cut a chunk of the roast for himself during Kai’s monologue. “This is pretty great, actually.”  
  
“Aw, thanks.” She reached over, took a slice of laukha, tried a bite for herself. “God _damn.”_  
  
Marty wagged his fork at her. “Speaking of gods, which one did you see back there on Sakaar, when that ship was falling on you?”  
  
She snorted, covering her mouth so that she didn’t lose her food. She swallowed. “Sorry to disappoint, but I didn’t see one. I was busy trying to get Aleta to move and wondering why she was busy doing an impression of a statue.”  
  
“Nice work on that outpost, by the way,” Marty commented.  
  
“Easy shot, really.” She took another bite of laukha. “Stationary target. I was the only thing moving.”  
  
“Was it Jagar who taught you how to fly, or Aleta?” Kai queried.   
  
“Jagar taught me a few things, but not much, just ‘cause we really didn’t have a whole lot of time together.” She waved her knife in exasperation. “Fucking typical of the Nova Corps. I marry this pilot, get promised all these benefits, move off to some outer colony when my town gets nuked off the map, and then they don’t even give my husband a _funeral!_ I hardly ever saw him, ‘cause he was out on missions so much. _Go to Syvox Three,_ they said, _you’ll be closer,_ they said, _he’ll be stationed there,_ they said. They kept him out in deep space chasing Kree ships and he could only come back once or twice a Xandarian lunar-cycle. They just wanted the wives of the pilots to pad the asteroid’s body count so that they could justify holding onto it as a colony.”  
  
“I’m sensing a little bitterness here,” Marty remarked.  
  
“Fuckin’ right I’m bitter.” She stabbed her portion of laukha harshly. “Feed me this bullshit about _unrecoverable bodies_ and _hostile fucking territory,_ well, Aleta and Stakar managed _just goddamn fine,_ didn’t they?”  
  
She reached for her glass, took a sip, knew it instantly- Xandarian wine, the sweeter variety from the northern hemisphere.   
  
“I’m sorry if I hit a nerve,” Kai murmured.   
  
“It’s fine.” She drank more of the wine, thought of a two-week period in the summer when Jagar had been on his mandatory leave and they’d gone exploring in his ship, touring the northern continents. “Back to your question, yeah, Aleta was the one who taught me piloting, mostly.”  
  
“She did a good job.”  
  
“That’s why Aleta and Stakar have to pay their pilots and mechanics so damn much. They train them well and everyone else wants to convince them to come work somewhere else.”  
  
“Speaking of _bitterness,”_ Kai said, chewing thoughtfully on a piece of laukha, “anybody know what Aleta’s issue with the Grandmaster is?”  
  
Cara shrugged. “Honestly, I don’t know on that one. She obviously fucking _hates_ him. Think I saw her sending some sort of curse towards his city right after she bombed the volcano.”  
  
Marty set his fork and knife on his plate, resting his hands on the table.  
  
“She ever tell you about the moravi?”  
  
“Ain’t that what M-ships are?” Kai wondered. “ _Moravi-_ class spacecraft?”  
  
“Yeah, but they’re named for something. Moravi are seagulls, native to a Xandarian colony called Teraji. It’s very old, one of the first the Nova Empire ever set up.”  
  
“And they’re the gulls M-ships are modelled off of,” Cara finished, a piece of the puzzle sliding into place.   
  
“Exactly. But has she told you the story of why, and what she did, what happened to her in the Silver City before she went to Teraji, and what she did there?”  
  
“No.” Cara set down her fork. “She promised to, though, right after we told the crew we were going to Sakaar.”  
  
“Then it ain’t my story to tell. It’s hers.” He picked up his knife and fork again. “Sorry, Kai.”  
  
“No, I understand.” Kai reached over, took some of the crabs. “We’ve all got things like that. How’s Aleta doing, by the way?”  
  
“Bit rough, really.” She dug back into the laukha. “She’s putting on a good front, but she’s still shook up over what happened on Vaikos. And what we saw there, well…” She shivered. “I’d be concerned if somebody _wasn’t_ fucked up about it, really.”  
  
“Stakar ain’t quite right yet either,” Marty added. “His crew didn’t take as hard of a hit as Aleta’s, but he still took a hit. The child slaves are what made it so much worse.”  
  
“There were _child slaves?_ On a _battlefield?_ ”  
  
Cara hummed; Martinex nodded. “They usually don’t bring them out to the Nova battles, where we normally fight the Kree,” he said. “It wastes ship-space that could’ve been used for a more able-bodied warrior. We got ambushed by a ship that was out reaving and plundering. They caused an extinction event, did genocide by fuel-scooping that star, probably meant to keep a few stragglers around for fighting. They go out and test the battle slaves, bathe them in blood, see which ones die right off, which ones have their minds break and go stark screeching mad, and which ones can take it. That’s where our Centaurian came from. Stakar found him on the battlefield, pinned under a Kree soldier. When Stakar came up to him, he started begging for Stakar to kill him, put him out of his misery.”  
  
“Aleta’s itching to go nuke Hala for what they did to that boy,” Cara murmured. “She hasn’t said as much, but I can tell.”  
  
“What was the youngest one you guys found?”   
  
Marty looked at her; she dug the heel of her knife into the table.  
  
“A Krylorian boy,” she whispered. “Kraglin’s age, at _most,_ if not younger. He could barely hold a knife.”  
  
“That was one of the worst ones,” Martinex murmured, words punctuated by the quiet scrape of knife against plate. “He was hurt real bad in the fighting. We tried to help him, but he was so afraid of us we couldn’t get near him for a long time. When we finally did, his heart gave out. Too much adrenaline in his system, too much blood loss.”  
  
Cara shook her head. “At least we weren’t alone,” she told Martinex. “I don’t want to think about the way it would’ve gone if it’d been just the _Valkyrie_ or the _Sharpwing_ out there alone.”  
  
“And that’s why Ravagers travel in packs,” Marty concluded. “Never, _ever_ just one ship alone, except for only briefly.”  
  
“We had a mercenary fleet with us while we were in Andromeda,” Kai defended.  
  
“I know.” She smiled at him. “We looked up everything about them when we heard you were working with them.”  
  
“Can’t have one of the Hundred working with slavers or some shit,” Marty almost growled. “Remember how that turned out for Pallasach?”  
  
Cara tilted her head; Kai looked confused.  
  
“I’ve heard the name,” Cara said slowly.   
  
“Supposed you two wouldn’t remember,” Marty muttered, crunching one of the crabs loudly between his molars. “Pallasach was one of the Hundred Captains a while before you joined up, Cara. He rose up through the ranks, won the right to wear the flames over his heart. And then we found out he was lending out his ships and crew to assist slaving parties. It came to light after an operation went wrong and eight cities were levelled on a planet called Jestiea. Three _thousand_ Jestieans were taken as slaves before the Nova Corps showed up and put a stop to it, and turned Pallasach over to our courts after Stakar and Aleta pulled some strings.”  
  
He wiped laukha-juice off his mouth with the back of his hand.  
  
“They had a fucking _mountain_ of evidence against him. Mainframe hacked into the Nova Corps database and found all of the videos and photos of the razed cities, and witnesses who testified about men wearing Ravager flames over cerulean leathers hauling away their families in chains. Cerulean was Pallasach’s color, see, and that’s why nobody’s allowed to use a certain shade of it anymore, won’t be for another couple centuries, if ever.”  
  
“So what did the other captains do?” Kai pressed.  
  
“Aleta bound him in chains- not metal ones, but ones made of light,” Marty elaborated. “She hardly ever shows off like that, but they were fucking _pissed._ She let them run hot, too, let him squirm and get burned while Stakar read off the verdict. I could smell his skin cooking from where I was sitting. She was circling him, you saw her do the same thing on Vaikos, and she had this grin-“ Marty twirled a finger in front of his face. “Menacing as hell, all toothy.”   
  
“Chuck calls it her wolf smile,” Kai cut in. “Says that whenever it comes out, she’s likely to rip someone’s throat out with her bare hands. Or with her teeth.”  
  
“They executed Pallasach right there, in the main meeting room,” Marty continued. “Stakar put a plasma bolt through his head. His crew was exiled to a man, with a mark on their names to shoot on sight if another Ravager clan ever came upon them. They died out, few years later. Got word they’d lost the favor of the Kree after getting caught on Jestiea, so they tried to pick a fight with the Nova Corps to win it back. Turns out that’s not a smart thing to do, when the ship you’re trying to take out is just an outrider in the Prime’s personal fleet.  
  
“It’s a good example, you see, of why Ravager exiles simply tend not to do well out in the universe once they’ve been cast out.”  
  
“Holy _shit,”_ Cara breathed.  
  
“And on Jestiea, they still sing songs for the missing three-thousand,” Marty continued. “The _Valkyrie, Sharpwing, Circuitry_ and _Serpentine_ are the only Ravager warships allowed to dock there, since they went back and put so much into offering aid to make up for what Pallasach had done. All the other captains stay away and out of Jestiean space, out of respect. Every once in a while, we’ll see a Jestiean on the slave markets or on the battlefield. It’s our duty to try to take them home, to try to make it right.”  
  
“I’m getting a feeling that the Ravager concept of _making it right_ and the Arcturan concept of paying a blood debt are closely intertwined,” Cara hedged, even though she was fairly certain it was true.  
  
Marty wagged his fork at her again. “They are,” he confirmed. “It’s one of those things where Arcturan culture spills over into Ravager culture. There’s a lot of those, really.”  
  
“I thought Aleta and Stakar hated their homeworld,” Kai mused, reaching over to cut another slab off of the main roast.   
  
“Nah, they just act like it,” Marty said, and Cara nodded in affirmation. “They hated the people in charge there, for sure, and stayed away while it was inhabited, but a genocidal civil war that wipes out every member of your species save two coupled with an EMP blast that took out all of the Arcturan electronic cultural archives _really_ has a way of turning your opinion on something like that.”  
  
“Aren’t we going there after this, actually?” she speculated.  
  
“Last I heard, that’s what Stakar was going to push for,” Marty confirmed. “He was going to try to convince Aleta to come back to Arcturus for a while, take a little bit of a sabbatical, get their minds off things.”  
  
“Funny, she was going to try to get him to do the same thing.” They both rolled their eyes. “God, they’re such an old married couple,” Cara muttered, taking another piece of laukha before Kai could steal it all.   
  
“They _are_ an old married couple,” Marty reminded her. “Elder species, remember?”  
  
“Elder species fucking _bullshit,”_ Cara mumbled reflexively, stabbing at the laukha.   
  
“Hey, now,” Kai cut in. “Look at _me!_ Ain’t just elder species that don’t age at the speed of sound, sweetheart.”  
  
She looked at him. “Oh, yeah?”  
  
Kai spread his arms. “Take a guess.”  
  
Marty snorted, stifling a laugh.   
  
“Aw, Kai, come on,” Cara whined. “Don’t embarrass me like this. I’m gonna be _way_ off, and you’re both going to laugh at me, come on, we _all_ know that’s how this is gonna go.”  
  
He raised an eyebrow at her.  
  
“Don’t fuck me like this, man.”  
  
He tilted his head.  
  
“Hell.” She exhaled sharply. “Alright. Twenty-eight. No. Thirty-four.”  
  
Martinex positively _cackled;_ Kai dropped his arms, grinning.  
  
_“Seventy-_ four,” he corrected. “Centaurians age _much_ slower than Xandarians.”  
  
“Grudges must be _impossible_ to forget back on Centauri Four,” she pondered. “Some guy steals a chicken, or whatever passes for chickens for you guys, and then the guy who it was stolen from is still around four hundred years later, telling all of his great-great-great grandchildren about the time that asshole over on the other side of the jungle personally razed his crops and poisoned his wells.”  
  
“That was part of why I left,” Kai admitted.   
  
“What, chicken-stealing?” Marty quipped.  
  
“No,” Kai scoffed. “People got so damn stuck on tradition, they wouldn’t look beyond it to change their ways. The mountain clans, for example- they used to be in the jungles and the plains, same as the rest of us, but when the offworlders came they ran up into the high passes and caves where nobody could ever find them. Went on about how it wasn’t right to talk to offworlders, how Centauri was firstly the _home_ of our gods, and it was a violation for it to be touched by aliens, so all they could try to do was keep part of it holy and secure.” Something dark went through his eyes; his crest deepened in color. “All it meant was that none of the jungle tribes could send an emissary to tell them when the offworlders came with guns, instead of money. All because they didn’t think our gods could reach out into the stars. When they came with collars _and_ guns, we could barely find each other, the tribes were so divided by then.”  
  
_“Do_ you think your god can reach this far out in the black?” Marty asked, softly- curious, not derisive.  
  
“Does Stakar and Aleta’s Hawk God quit watching them just because they’re not on Arcturan soil? I know who I am, Marty, and I know where I came from, and where I belong. Anthos does not forsake me just because my home is no longer on Centauri. He knows where I am, so long as I know him by knowing myself.”  
  
“So why _did_ you leave Centauri?” Cara wondered.  
  
He looked at her, _really_ looked at her, ruby eyes piercing down somewhere near her soul.  
  
“I didn’t want to be a part of a culture that thought it was right to sell babies to slavers,” Kai said flatly. “Simple as that. I went out and painted the stars with Kree blood to try to silence the screams I still hear when I sleep.”  
  
“And after all that, what you saw on your homeworld, what you’ve seen out here, you still think there’s a wise and benevolent god out there?” Marty looked puzzled. “I just don’t see _how.”_  
  
“Do we know light without also knowing darkness, softness without first knowing harshness, comfort without pain, joy without grief? Can we ever appreciate that what we have if we don’t know what its absence means, if we don’t fight to get it back?”  
  
“I suppose not,” Marty conceded.   
  
_“That_ is why child slavery coexists with the presence of a benevolent god, Martinex,” Kai declared. “If we never see what _can_ happen, then we’ll never realize why we should fight to prevent it in the first place. It’s all abstract until it comes for you, until you realize what you took for granted.”  
  
He had a point, Cara thought. She hadn’t appreciated her life on Xandar until she hadn’t had it anymore. She wouldn’t go back, not now, not for a million units, but… in the days after the Siege of Syvox Three, when she’d been heartbroken and alone and positively _terrified,_ she would’ve given nearly anything to get back what she’d lost, been so despondent she’d nearly lost herself.  
  
It was hard, losing your home and getting transplanted into a foreign culture that directly opposed everything your old one had taught you. It was easier when you had a _lot_ of things to be angry at your old one about.  
  
Still hard, though.  
  
“What about you?” Marty gave her a semi-delicate look, one of those signature _hey I get this might be a bit sensitive feel free to tell me to fuck off_ looks that characterized their more serious conversations. “Do you think Xandarian gods can reach into the next galaxy over?”  
  
“I don’t think Xandarian gods can reach into the next star system,” Cara said darkly. “Hell, I don’t think they can reach much beyond their temple walls.”  
  
Kai gave her a strange look. “Really?”  
  
“If they could, would my husband have suffocated out in the black after his ship was shot down?”  
  
“It was a small miracle your escape pod didn’t get smashed by debris before we picked it up,” Marty murmured. “Call it what you will, but there was a _lot_ of wreckage out there. Statistically, it was slightly improbable.”  
  
_If it was a miracle, then it was the Hawk God’s work, not any Xandarian deity,_ Cara thought, but nodded instead, taking another go at the wine.   
  
“Mainframe could give you the odds,” Kai commented, and she snorted, then remembered something.  
  
“Hey, Marty. Does Mainframe get parasites or viruses?”  
  
“Oh, don’t you fucking start on that too,” he snapped. “Stakar was bouncing that one off of me on the way down to Knowhere.”  
  
“Wait, what?” Kai interjected.   
  
“Parasites,” Marty said definitively. “They’re all parasites. Viruses leech her power and non-digital tagalongs fuck up her mechanics. The non-digital ones ain’t viruses, so they’re all parasites.”  
  
“No, but couldn’t it be said that _because_ she’s digital everything is a virus to her and she has no concept of a parasite?”  
  
“Guys, hold on, catch me up on this one. Parasites and viruses?”  
  
“Stakar and Aleta have been going at this one since Vaikos,” Marty explained. “Does Mainframe get viruses or parasites? See, it could be argued that since a virus drains her power and otherwise fucks up her systems, for her, it’s a parasite. And if she gets an orloni nesting in one of her bodies or something, then that’s _definitely_ a parasite. So does she only get parasites, and not viruses? Can something be a virus and not a parasite? Are non-digital parasites also viruses because she’s digital and therefore has no concept of a parasite, only viruses?”  
  
“Man, I _just_ said that.”  
  
“I’m _recapping,_ Cara!”  
  
“Shit.” Kai leaned back, bringing a hand to absently rub at his face. “I… hell. I…”  
  
“I know, it’s a total mindfuck, isn’t it?” She emptied her glass, reached for the bottle, refilled it, took another taste. “Maybe… maybe it’s both?”  
  
“No, no, that’s too easy,” Kai disagreed, and she laughed, a pleasant warmth starting to hum around her skull as the wine finally began to do its job. “Has anyone asked Mainframe what she thinks?”  
  
“Of _course_ not,” Cara said. “That’s a recurring theme here, _do_ keep up.”  
  
“Right, yeah,” Kai muttered.  
  
“Look, all the speculating is just so much more _fun,”_ Marty insisted. “What if Mainframe gives some kind of definitive answer? Then the whole game’s over.”  
  
“Breaks up the deep-space flights, that’s for sure,” Cara added, and took some crackers. “Long way back to Knowhere after this. Longer than that on the way to Arcturus.”  
  
“They’re probably gonna call a Table once we get there,” Martinex said, almost complaining. “That just means more waiting around.”  
  
Kai hummed thoughtfully, considering his wineglass. “Do you think Aleta would let me go out hunting on Arcturus? It’s been too long. I miss it.”  
  
“Probably,” Cara told him. “Her and Stakar hardly ever go out in the forests, they stay out by the sea. Remember that meat we all had the second-to-last time a Table was called?”  
  
Marty smirked; Kai nodded.  
  
“They went out hunting on the sea, got this _gigantic_ whale- took both the _Siren_ and the _Remora_ to tow it to shore. They shared the carcass with all of the clans. I’m sure as long as you aren’t wasteful about it, they wouldn’t mind.”  
  
“Oh, I won’t be,” Kai assured her.   
  
“By the way, while we’re talking about hunting, there’s a tournament coming up,” Marty chimed in. “Do you think that green orloni of yours is as good of a fighter as she is a runner?”  
  
“Have you _seen_ her teeth? She can take that scrawny-ass white one you’ve got any day.”  
  
“Wanna bet?”  
  
“Seventy units your albino gets his ass handed to him,” she challenged.   
  
“I’ll put forty that Zalka’s teal takes your red,” Kai tossed in. “Sorry, dear, but I am _not_ betting against her.”  
  
“That’s fair,” Cara conceded. “Marty?”  
  
He raised his glass, toasted her. “Oh, it’s _on.”  
_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A quick Google search tells me that a blue whale can feed 604,000 people if you include all of the weight that isn't bone as edible, and if you assume that only 20% of that weight is edible (a severe underestimate), then you can still feed 120,800 people with half a pound of meat each. Increase the size of the whale and the edible meat percentage, and it's realistic that a Really Big Whale can feed all hundred Ravager clans, seeing as how most are probably *much* smaller than Stakar and Aleta's.
> 
> Please leave comments! :) They feed the muse, and I do try to incorporate suggestions!


	5. These, My Most Precious of Treasures

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Is the value of a thing intrinsic to it, or in what people ascribe to it?
> 
> Is a planet still a home if its people are gone?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This and the next part were originally going to be one chapter, but I figured this was long enough and I had gone long enough without updating to split them into two. Sorry for the delay!

“You know,” Aleta said thoughtfully, drumming her fingers against the table, “If we started showing up to these meetings late, we could probably ruin his schedule for the whole day.”  
  
Stakar tilted his head slightly, his hand pausing in the middle of one of the patterns it was tracing on her thigh. “Go on?”  
  
“He always keeps us waiting, right?” She gestured around the table, where they’d been waiting for the Collector for a rather indecently long time _again._ “But I _really_ doubt he actually has another meeting or something important to do, he just does something else until he feels like coming in. As it stands, he has to clear at _least_ three hours in his schedule to play this petty-ass game. If we quit being punctual, we could push that out to five or seven.”  
  
_It would serve him right,_ Krugarr’s mental voice thrummed in her head. Behind him, his second- a Shi’ar exiled for genetic deviance from the standard- nodded in agreement.  
  
“He could at least provide more chairs,” Cara muttered from her place against the wall, one leg tucked up under her, giving her the look one of the long-legged waterbirds that hunted in Arcturus’ marshes.  
  
“You can say that again,” Martinex snarked, then looked over to Yondu at his side, practically a permanent addition to his shadow now. “Kid, promise me that if you’re ever hosting people like this, don’t be a jackass about it the way Taneleer Tivan is.”  
  
Yondu looked at him askance, probably wondering when he’d ever be in the position of _host_ instead of _guest,_ but acquiesced. “This one understands.”  
  
“Higher ceilings would be nice too,” Kai added, reaching up and rapping his knuckles against the ceiling for emphasis.  
  
“To be fair, I wasn’t here when the deal was made,” Charlie said sympathetically. “It wasn’t a consideration then.”  
  
She didn’t see it, but she could almost _feel_ Stakar rolling his eyes. “What, like he hasn’t got dossiers on all of us?”  
  
“I don’t think you need me to tell you the probability on that one,” Mainframe chirruped from her place on the table in front of Krugarr, having left her body back on the _Circuitry_.  
  
That was the problem with the long-lived elder races, Aleta thought, taking Stakar’s hand under the table. The Collector didn’t need to find information about them in old archives; he’d lived it, same as them, and had just written their files from experience rather than hearsay.  
  
That was one benefit of outliving everybody else: nobody who knew your secrets was around to share them.  
  
_Finally,_ the door opened.  
  
Lessai stepped in, and then to the side, sinking into a well-honed curtsey.  
  
“May I present Taneleer Tivan, the Collector,” she recited as he stepped in. “And also, his honored guest, En Dwi Gast, the Grandmaster.”  
  
It took a _lot_ to make Aleta Ogord falter in her step. You didn’t live through a hundred wars and a genocide and not end up numb to most things.  
  
Even so, she breathed in sharply, heart rate spiking in preparation for a fight, instinctively pressing herself back in her chair, just infinitesimally so.  
  
Stakar’s hand tightened painfully around hers- not his reaction, but for her, something to center herself around. She blinked, consciously relaxed her shoulders, squeezed back- _don’t worry, I won’t kill everyone in the room.  
  
Yet._  
  
There would be time to react later. Not now.  
  
“Lady Aleta,” The Grandmaster said cheerfully, walking towards her until Krugarr uncoiled his tail from around the base of his stool and gave him a harsh, beady look that stopped him in his tracks. “A most pleasant surprise!”  
  
The hairs on the back of her neck stood on end. She felt Stakar take a breath to counter, to deal with it for her, and tapped a finger against his knuckles. _I’ve got this._  
  
“I understand Arcturan titles do not translate well to Galactic Common, particularly Íféqevrosi ones,” she returned smoothly, tone perfect and polite and even, the way it had been forged in the towers of the Silver City. “But I must inform you that your method of address is _sorely_ outdated where I am concerned. My current title is _Captain;_ before that, it was _Admiral,_ and _Commander_ before that, and _Captain_ again before _that._ I first entered the military as a lieutenant; surely, you visited Arcturus between then and the end of the war? I seem to remember something about an arms deal?”  
  
“I’m sure my brother meant no offense,” Tivan cut in hurriedly before she could tell the sordid tale of the Grandmaster’s fondness for Arcturan slaves. “You did say it yourself, Arcturan titles are rather difficult to keep track of!”  
  
“Quite,” Stakar said coldly. Even with Tivan’s attempted defusal, tension drew the room tight like an overloaded cable; Martinex had come to attention, hand just a breath away from his blaster, Yondu looking confused but following his lead, while Cara pulled her leg up a little closer to her body, fingers dancing closer to one of the knives she always kept in her boots. Krugarr looked ready for murder, and so did Charlie, really, with Kai was reaching for an arrow while Mainframe was probably deploying a strike force from the _Circuitry_ without saying a word-  
  
Aleta took her free hand, bending her arm around behind the chair.  
  
Open hand, fingers pressed together, swept behind the back. A silent order.  
  
_Stand down. Wait for further escalation._  
  
Martinex snorted softly, but relaxed against the wall again; Cara did the opposite, standing on both legs, in that straight-backed pose the Nova Corps loved so much.  
  
“A simple misunderstanding,” Aleta verified, disentangling her other hand from Stakar’s to bring both of them above the table- another clear cue, open hands with no weapons, _we did not come here to spill blood today._ “Something that happens all too often in pan-galactic negotiations, don’t you think?”  
  
“Do I _ever,”_ Tivan sighed melodramatically, throwing himself into the empty chair at Krugarr’s left (to Krugarr’s revulsion) while the Grandmaster took the next seat down, with a much-too-intimate look at Charlie.  
  
“I accidentally started a minor war with the Shi’ar Empire, once, by using a misconjugated verb,” Stakar mused.  
  
_“Accidentally,”_ Aleta repeated sardonically, and Charlie chuckled; Kai shook his head.  
  
_Minor war? More like the Great Six-Day Dick-Measuring Contest._  
  
“Some people _do_ need to be put in their place sometimes, _don’t they,”_ the Collector said, giving his brother a pointed look.  
  
“Speaking of which,” the Grandmaster began, “I understand you were simply the instrument, Aleta, but did you have to go so far?”  
  
She shrugged nonchalantly. “They were shooting at us. We did what we had to do.”  
  
“It all got rather messy, you see, once the volcano started acting up again,” Stakar elaborated. “Shots that were intended to hit ships… well, didn’t.”  
  
“My _mountains,_ Aleta,” the Grandmaster insisted.  
  
“I’ll pay for the repairs,” the Collector soothed. “And on the topic of payment…”  
  
“The same as we agreed before,” Stakar returned. “Your goods are being offloaded as we speak. What you do with them-“ he waved a hand indicating both the Collector and Grandmaster in turn- “isn’t my problem.”  
  
“Of course not,” the Collector agreed easily, and Krugarr finally started to relax- _so this_ is _actually going to end with nobody dying._ “Lessai, get to work on the transfer.”  
  
“Of course,” Lessai murmured, curtseying before she left the room.  
  
“Then that concludes our business,” Stakar said abruptly, pushing back his chair with a harsh screech of metal-on-metal. “We won’t be needing an escort out.”  
  
“Leaving so soon, Starhawk?” The Grandmaster called after him, the door already open.  
  
Aleta ground her teeth.  
  
“Yes,” Stakar said simply, and left. “We’re terribly busy, you know.”  
  
“Places to go,” Aleta supplied, following. “People to see.”  
  
“Things to take from people who want them less than we do,” Martinex added, and Krugarr nodded thoughtfully as he carefully picked Mainframe’s head up off of the table.  
  
If Charlie had a one-liner of his own, she didn’t hear it. She saw, through sensing the movement of the light rather than by sight, Martinex pushing Yondu up in front of him, blocking the Collector’s line of sight- _good, he sees it too._  
  
“So how long do you think it’ll be before we can come back here, you think?” Stakar asked her as they walked down the hallway. The overhead lights were that bland white again; she wondered how much it’d cost him to replace them all.  
  
“Oh, a few months or so, maybe half a standard year,” Aleta postulated. “And a four-month embargo from the other clans. He did insult me _twice.”_  
  
“I can’t _believe_ you let him walk over you like that,” Cara said hotly, the sound of her footsteps a quick staccato as she caught up.  
  
_“Mind yourself,”_ Aleta snarled quietly. “Do you _seriously_ think he can’t still hear us?”  
  
Cara at least had the decency to look slightly abashed. “I’m just _saying,_ Captain,” she restarted, quieter this time, “that ain’t- wasn’t- right.”  
  
“There’s a lot of shit here that ain’t right,” Stakar countered, gesturing at a glass cage as they entered the museum proper. Its occupant looked back out at them, a vaguely humanoid figure visible through the fogged panels. “You have to pick your battles.”  
  
“Trust me, if he wasn’t an Eternal, I’d have shot him a long time ago,” Aleta muttered, scanning the various displays as they went past. “It wouldn’t do any good. They’re practically impossible to kill.”  
  
“He says the same thing about you two,” Cara said plainly.  
  
“I hate him more than he hates me,” Aleta pointed out, then squinted at a display. “Hold on.”  
  
She picked her way across the room, weaving between several unidentifiable creatures, a display of skulls, and a rack of ancient Shi’ar weapons before reaching the one that had caught her eye.  
  
“I did try to group them chronologically,” the Collector said over the loudspeakers, his voice echoing.  
  
“You were off by several millennia,” Aleta called back. “The idea is contemporary, yes, but the figure dates _much_ later.”  
  
A glass box sat on a podium, about waist-height. Inside, suspended in a holo-array, a pale grey hawk hovered as if in mid-strike, talons reaching out to seize unseen prey, beak open in a silent screech. Its wings reached as far as her spread hand.  
  
She bent over slightly, taking in the delicate details of each feather, painstakingly carved filament by filament, the ones on the neck bowing the way a real bird’s would in the wind. The top of the right wing had taken damage and been struck nearly smooth, just the larger curves of the feathers’ outlines remaining.  
  
That could be fixed.  
  
_Arcturan religious idol,_ the plaque read. _Sect, significance, creator, material and date unknown.  
  
_ “Sect unknown?” Aleta shouted. “Come _on!”_  
  
“I did not wish to make presumptions.”  
  
“I think this one was pretty damn safe to make,” Aleta said, more to herself than anything as she pulled a knife out of one of the pockets on the inside of her jacket. She pushed it through the silicon joining glass and podium, and cut through it like butter.  
  
“That’s entirely unnecessary,” the Collector said, rather urgently. “I’ll sell it to you, if it means that much to you.”  
  
She cut through the joinery on the next side, circling the podium. “Knowhere is in the Nova Empire’s territory,” she recited, and felt Stakar nearly quiver with restrained laughter at her side. “That means that technically, as much as you like to pretend otherwise, all trade here is pursuant to their laws.” She started on the third side. “By clause seventeen of article ninety-four of the Nova Empire’s interplanetary trade laws, and by article three of their laws on interplanetary and intergalactic refugees, the survivors of a mass planetary extinction event are entitled to all relics obtained from said planet, upon their request to the current holder of said relics.” She finished the third side, and cut the fourth with a single blow, looking straight into the nearest camera. “This is my request.”  
  
She picked up the glass and tossed it aside, snatching the hawk out of its magnet-cage before it deactivated.  
  
Carefully, reverently, she flipped it to look at the underside of its wings.  
  
_Cut by Sar_ _ézha Valanui of Calamorvos,_ _from the jaw of_ _Íkashka the Devourer, in the winter of the year of the frozen sea._  
  
Stakar’s breath was warm on her neck. “Is she the same Sarézha I met during the war?”  
  
“The very same,” Aleta murmured. “And I knew Íkashka, too. I held the sails while Nadya and Rosa threw the harpoons.”  
  
“I remember him, too,” Stakar commented. “Well, really, I remember how furious Father was when he ate three luxury ships.”  
  
She smiled sadly, turning the hawk over in her hand again, wrapping her fingers more securely around its body.  
  
“It’s meant to be in the sun,” she whispered, her voice quivering. “It should feel the wind on its wings and see the sky, not be locked away in the dark like this.”  
  
“Can you at least compensate me for what it cost to acquire?” the Collector interrupted over the loudspeakers again.  
  
“Tell me who you bought it from,” she returned.  
  
“It was acquired on a condition of confidentiality,” Tivan explained. “I can’t do that.”  
  
“Then I can’t do _that_ ,” she retorted, turning back towards the main walkway and clutching the hawk to her chest. “I’m sure whatever you ate for breakfast cost you as much as this did.”  
  
Tivan made a dismayed sound. “If that’s the way you want to play it, dear, insulting _me_ in _my place of business-“_  
  
Stakar’s hand pressed against the small of her back, urging her a touch faster as he silently waved the others on.  
  
“Don’t make me call on those forty-seven ships, Taneleer,” she reprimanded. “They’ll have your lovely museum turned to ash on my word, or if I fail to complete my check-in. Your choice, really.”  
  
_“Go,”_ Stakar hissed at Martinex, who glared back at him but went ahead with Yondu behind him. Cara, loyal unto the flames of hell itself, filled in on Aleta’s other side- one hand on her blaster, the other hovering over the button (semi-affectionately nicknamed the _Shit’s Fucked_ button) that would call in a strike.  
  
The only reason Martinex had left was because he responsible for the kid, who hadn’t signed up to die on a trade mission; Cara would refuse any such order, and damn if that didn’t say something.  
  
“The way I see it, the only way your museum stays intact is you let us leave unharmed,” Aleta called out.  
  
“And you think I’m going to let it pass that a _Ravager_ comes in and steals from me, right under my nose?”  
  
“We’re legally in the right on this one, for once,” Stakar muttered.  
  
“Technically, you stole this from _us,”_ Aleta snapped. She could see the exit now. “I’m taking it back.”  
  
“Damn your Xandarian law,” Tivan spat. “It’s _mine.”_  
  
“We _are_ the law, far as I fucking care,” Stakar growled. “I don’t see our warships’ peer anywhere around here. That makes _us_ the dominant force here, and I say that this _isn’t a negotiation!”  
  
_ There was a moment of silence- well, relative silence, since Charlie didn’t do _anything_ quietly.  
  
“So might makes right, Starhawk?”  
  
Aleta bared her teeth.  
  
“Yes,” Stakar said flatly. “Yes, it does.”  
  
“I thought you were a pacifist?” Tivan queried.  
  
“I _was,”_ Stakar corrected, nudging her through the door to Cara’s palpable relief.  
  
“And how well did that work out for you?” Tivan asked.  
  
Stakar froze.  
  
So did she.  
  
“He’s not worth the missiles, Stakar,” Charlie implored, physically shoving both of them through the door. “Come on, you know he isn’t.”  
  
Stakar’s eyes were glowing. She was sure hers were the same way. Her ears were positively _ringing-_  
  
“Captain,” Cara pleaded, pulling at her sleeve again- _you sweet thing, my dear heart, what do you know of rage?_ Narrower hands than Charlie’s pushed at her shoulders, her legs catching her weight out of instinct more than any organized attempt to walk- Kai, it had to be, forcing her along.  
  
“Aleta,” Cara insisted, “he _will_ kill us all if you attack him. You might be willing to risk that, but it ain’t right to put your whole crew under a death sentence without them knowing why. It isn’t right, don’t you see-“  
  
“I do,” Aleta acknowledged, feeling oddly detached from her body, her voice cool and calm as she stepped away from Kai. She blinked rapidly, pulled Sarézha’s hawk closer as she reached over and put a hand on Stakar’s shoulder.  
  
“Come on,” she said softly, in the old Arcturan, in Íféqevrosi, their shared mother tongue. “Our crews are waiting for us. We need to get home.”  
  
It took a moment, but when he met her eyes, he was himself again.  
  
“So we do,” he agreed, and took her hand.  
  
  
_*_  
  
  
The walk back to the ships was tense and quiet, absence the usual ribaldry; Martinex waited by the _Siren,_ his eyes bright gold and burning with an as-yet unspoken tirade, and while Aleta knew her name would be taken in vain several times on the way back to the warships, she couldn’t bring herself to particularly _care._  
  
She made her way up the _Remora’s_ loading ramp, Cara close behind- Martinex’s _Obsidian_ was in no shape to fly, and if one first mate couldn’t bring their ship to the negotiations, then it looked better for none of them to do so. She keyed in the close command for the ramp, and started towards the cockpit, idly noting a slight unbalanced whine in the main hydraulic cylinders.  
  
Every time she closed her eyes, she saw Sarézha’s face.  
  
The loading ramp clicked shut, and Cara snapped.  
  
“Do you want to tell me just _why_ you almost got us all killed for a fucking _statue?”_  
  
“It’s not just a statue,” Aleta protested weakly.  
  
“Yeah, I get it, you wanted to get back at him for whatever grudge you’ve got against the Grandmaster,” Cara ranted, “but to risk everything just for a token of _pettiness?_ God, Aleta, I thought you were better than that!”  
  
_“Stop it,”_ Aleta snarled, wheeling and bearing down on her. “Did you even hear _half_ of what I said back there? Don’t pass judgement on what you don’t _understand!”_  
  
_“Then help me understand!”_ Cara cried out, throwing out her hands. When was it, Aleta wondered, when Cara had completely lost her fear of her captain? “God knows I _want_ to, but I’m fumbling in the dark over here!”  
  
_”I never told you because you didn’t need to know!”_ As soon as the words left her mouth, she _knew_ they weren’t talking about quite the same thing anymore. “You _know_ nobody ends up on a Ravager warship because their background was sunshine and smooth seas. Forgive me if I don’t go about wearing my heart on my sleeve and telling everyone _my_ reasons why.”  
  
They were in each other’s faces now, those pale grey eyes bright and filling her field of view; for a moment, she wondered if the metaphor had gotten lost in translation.  
  
Cara spoke eight different Xandarian languages, didn’t she? Surely at least one of them had seafaring-related figures of speech?  
  
Cara’s eyes dropped to the figurine Aleta still held over her heart.  
  
“Start small, then,” Cara suggested breathlessly, her arms falling to her side. “Tell me what you risked it all for, just now.”  
  
A tense second passed by, then another, and then-  
  
Slowly, she extended her arm, holding the bird out for Cara to see.  
  
“These runes here,” Aleta narrated, bringing her free hand around to brush a finger under them, “they tell the story of who made the carving, what they made it from, and when. The right wing tells who, and the left tells you the material and the season. They take weeks to make, so it’s never an exact date of completion. We were loose with dates, anyway.”  
  
“I can barely make anything out,” Cara murmured, peering closer.  
  
“They’re meant to blend with the feathers- you really have to know what you’re looking for. See here, how the filaments go only in a slight curve, but the ones here curl more?”  
  
“I think so.”  
  
“This was made by a friend of mine- a _very_ close friend,” she corrected. “Her name was Sarézha. We were hunt-sisters- _priestesses,_ is the better Xandarian equivalent. We were priestesses together.”  
  
Cara scoffed gently, but still looked at the hawk with no small amount of wonder. “You, a priestess? I’m trying to imagine it.”  
  
“Are you thinking of something like the sisterhoods on Xandar where they swear themselves to celibacy and wear floor-length hooded cloaks even in the middle of summer? Praying all the time that they aren’t out shouting about the end of the world?”  
  
“Yeah, that’s it. I can’t see you doing that.”  
  
“Oh, no.” Aleta smiled. “It wasn’t like that. We were huntresses.”  
  
Cara looked at her askance. “Priestesses _and_ huntresses?”  
  
“It wasn’t a very pacifistic religion.”  
  
“No men?”  
  
“Not in my enclave. We’d occasionally have a few passing through, some would stay awhile, but ours was exclusively female. There was a male one, just across the mountains from us. Mixed groups weren’t unheard of, it just wasn’t done in our region.”  
  
Cara hummed thoughtfully. “Sounds nice, really.”  
  
“It was,” Aleta confirmed. “Sarézha and I were… particularly close.”  
  
Cara straightened. “ _Close-_ close, or…?”  
  
Aleta chuckled. “Not like that, no.” She started back towards the cockpit.  
  
“Priestesses of _what,_ exactly?”  
  
“Of the Hawk God,” Aleta elaborated, settling into the pilot’s seat. “We proved our worthiness with our hunts. The Hawk God is all about survival of the fittest, see; may the best win, by whatever means they can. It’s the original arms race, a game we all play.”  
  
She started going through the startup procedures, slowed down by only having one free hand. Cara looked thoughtful as she took the copilot’s chair, and wordlessly filled in a sequence without needing a cue.  
  
There was a distant, purr-like sound as the _Siren’s_ engines fired up; when she looked over, Marty stared back at her from the part of the cockpit window she could see. He waved a hand near his face in a gesture of consternation, and mouthed _what the fuck was that about?_  
  
_I’ll tell you later,_ she mouthed back, mentally bracing herself for it, and waved her hand dismissively towards him as she turned back to her instrument array to key in the start command.  
  
  
_**_  
  
  
The stars had always been more beautiful out by Calamorvos.  
  
Íféqevros was big enough of a city that the light pollution started to wash out the night sky, and the spaceport up above finished the job. You had to sail for nearly a full day from the port to get to dark sky again, or hike over on the other side of the mountains.  
  
Which, coincidentally (or not), was just where the enclave happened to be.  
  
“What do you think it’s like, off-planet?” Aleta wondered, peering out into the inky darkness. There wasn’t a cloud in sight; the late-summer drought was just starting to taper off, and the nights were still warm enough that they didn’t need to wear furs. The grass was still soft on her skin, ripping instead of crunching when she idly threaded it between her fingers and pulled.  
  
The question hung between them for awhile, the silence close and intimate.  
  
“I think it’s cold,” Sarézha said finally, her voice quiet, but loud in the clearing. “There’s no sunrise for them on their ships. I know the machines keep them warm, but it wouldn’t be the same as the sun, would it?”  
  
“No,” Aleta conceded. There was a certain loveliness to drawing warmth from sunlight, a definite _wholeness_ to the heat that artificial sources just couldn’t replicate.  
  
“And it must be lonely,” Sarézha continued. “Penned in like that, with nowhere to go? How do they stand it?”  
  
“ _I_ think it wouldn’t be so different from being on a sea-ship,” Aleta pointed out. “You don’t really have anywhere to go there, either.”  
  
“You can go swimming,” Sarézha retorted, and Aleta laughed, their heads hitting together. They were laid out in the grass, head to head, hair tangling together, pale silver on black- _like starlight-_ standing out against the grass.  
  
_Space is just another sea. It can be conquered, too._  
  
“And you’re the sailor, not me,” Sarézha continued.  
  
“You like it too,” Aleta accused. “The sea-spray, the wind in your hair, the freedom it brings. Come on. I know you do.” She knocked her head against Sarézha’s again to emphasize the point.  
  
“The salt gets everywhere,” Sarézha muttered, and Aleta chuckled. “I prefer land game to seafood, anyway.”  
  
“I am _personally offended,_ Saré.”  
  
“I’m just saying, mountain goat meat tastes better than fish.”  
  
“You can’t just make a blanket statement like that! Shallows fish? Deepwater? Whale? Shark?”  
  
“The ones in the lake. They have no flavor.”  
  
“Those aren’t _seafood,_ you _heathen.”_  
  
“Careful with that word, now,” Sarézha teased.  
  
“The fish in the lake _do_ have no flavor,” Aleta conceded, settling deeper into the grass. “The ones in the ocean _do,_ and it’s just as good as your _mountain goat.”_  
  
“It’s good when you cook it,” Sarézha admitted.  
  
“You have to know what you’re doing with it,” Aleta stressed. “Back in Ífé, I knew a captain’s husband who could make something out of a swamp taste like it was worthy of off-world export.”  
  
“And again with the offworlders,” Saré muttered.  
  
“I’ve met more of them than you, of course I think of them more.”  
  
“I know enough about them that I don’t want to think of them more than I have to.”  
  
Aleta tilted her head, as much as one could when laying down. “Oh?”  
  
“My sister fell in with one,” Sarézha explained. “He looked Arcturan, but he didn’t act like one of us. He wouldn’t say what town he was from, or what planet. After he left, she found out she was pregnant. I couldn’t understand why she’d let him touch her, much less like _that._ She told me he was very… _charismatic.”_  
  
Sarézha turned her head to the side and spat at the memory. Spitting was held to be a high insult on Arcturus, one of the deepest _fuck yous_ a person could deliver.  
  
Aleta flinched.  
  
“The baby nearly killed her, ‘cause her body kept trying to reject it, and she never recovered. She died five years after it was born, and two years after that, it wandered outside during a snowstorm. We never found the body.”  
  
“That’s horrible,” Aleta whispered. “What was her name?”  
  
“Mariah.” She sniffed. “If I never see another offworlder again, it’ll be too soon.” Sarézha sighed. “I’m sure you feel the same way.”  
  
Aleta swallowed, clenched her teeth in an attempt to get rid of the lump in her throat, and still couldn’t quite get words to come.  
  
“I’m sorry,” Sarézha murmured, reaching around to stroke Aleta’s hair. “I… I wasn’t thinking. Of course you hate them as much as I do.”  
  
“I really do,” Aleta breathed, her voice breaking into a sob on the last word.  
  
She hid her face in the crook of her elbow, breath ragged.  
  
Sarézha cleared her throat. “I came here because my parents didn’t have enough money to keep me around, from paying all of my sister’s medical expenses- you know how it goes, it wasn’t covered because we didn’t have immediate family in the military. But once they get back on their feet, I don’t think they’d mind if you came back with me.”  
  
Aleta blinked, and for a moment shoved aside the thought that it had been _her_ father who had implemented the military-only medical-expense-coverage rule, how could Sarézha not hate her for it?  
  
“Really?”  
  
“Yeah.” Sarézha reached over, took her hand. “Come back to Calamorvos with me. They’d love to have you.”  
  
“I…” She blinked again. “I have a brother, back in Íféqevros. It wouldn’t be right if I left him alone like that.”  
  
_I already have,_ she thought guiltily.  
  
“He can come too,” Sarézha said dismissively.  
  
“Are you _sure?”_  
  
“The house has been too empty since my sister died and her baby left,” Saré reasoned. “It’d be good for it to have some life again. It’d be nothing compared to what you’re used to, of course-”  
  
“That’s fine,” Aleta said immediately. “More than fine.”  
  
The grip on her hand tightened.  
  
“Think about it,” Sarézha urged.  
  
  
_*_  
  
  
She’d been called back to Íféqevros before she could follow Sarézha somewhere else.  
  
  
_*_  
  
  
The day had come, during one of the _many_ civil wars, where Aleta and Stakar had been discussing battle-plans before departing camp, when a friendly voice had come calling across the field.  
  
_“Commander Ogord!”_  
  
She and Stakar had both turned; it was proper address for both of them, at the time.  
  
And then she had spotted her, crossing the field with a standard-issue rifle strapped to her back, in the black-and-silver of an Íféqevrosi soldier’s uniform. Pale silver hair, and bright blue eyes-  
  
Sarézha walked up to them, grinning.  
  
“I heard you were given another command, when they started marshalling units from this area,” Sarézha explained. “So I figured I might as well sign on with you, rather than wait for the draft to put me with someone I didn’t know.”  
  
“Sound thinking,” Stakar commented, regarding her pensively. “I don’t think I’ve had the pleasure..?”  
  
  
_*_  
  
  
It had ended with blood and ash, the way all Arcturan things did.  
  
“Saré- _Sar_ _é-“_  
  
She cried out as Aleta pressed her hands to the wound in her side, the silver accents on their uniforms staining a dark lilac, the stench of death in the air as Sarézha braced herself against a rock.  
  
Aleta’s hands were covered in blood, a dark, rich purple of the sort that only came from the deepest wounds, that rarely heralded survival.  
  
“Just hold on,” Aleta pleaded. “They’ll come with help soon-“  
  
“You know damn well help isn’t coming,” Sarézha snarled.  
  
Aleta bowed her head.  
  
“We should have gone to Calamorvos,” she said. “I never should have gone back to Ífé.”  
  
“Then we would’ve just gotten our names pulled,” Sarézha pointed out. “There isn’t anyone left who _isn’t_ fighting.”  
  
Aleta inhaled sharply, and adjusted her hands; Sarézha bared her teeth, the color already gone from her face.  
  
“This is going to be the end, someday, you know,” Sarézha panted. “This-“ she gestured weakly at the battlefield, strewn with bodies- “this cannot go on. This _cannot_ stand. They _will_ keep killing until there’s nothing left to kill.”  
  
“I know,” Aleta acknowledged quietly.  
  
Sarézha tried to take a deep breath, but cried out sharply when the motion moved the destroyed part of her ribcage.  
  
“We should have gone to Calamorvos,” she agreed, tears running down her face. “We would have run. We could have made it. You were right, we should have gone offworld when we had the chance-“  
  
“Shh,” Aleta soothed, bringing her hands away from the hopeless struggle of trying to bandage the wound without a med-kit, scrubbing them quickly against her pants before cradling the back of Sarézha’s head. She brought herself closer to Saré’s shoulders, so she could lean forward to touch their foreheads together.  
  
It was an unspeakably intimate Íféqevrosi gesture, the sharing of breath.  
  
They both closed their eyes, and tried to draw comfort from the closeness. Sarézha’s hands settled into a heavy weight at the back of Aleta’s head, growing colder and colder.  
  
_There’s nothing I can do except this._  
  
“Aleta?” Sarézha called, nearly too quiet to hear.  
  
“Yeah?”  
  
“I’m afraid.”  
  
“I’m here,” Aleta consoled, pulling her closer so that Sarézha could feel the warmth of her body. “I’m here. I’m not leaving you.”  
  
  
_*_  
  
  
She hadn’t, not until Sarézha’s body had grown cold and her heart had long since stopped.  
  
Even then, Stakar had had to pull her off so that she didn’t get left behind in the retreat.  
  
  
_**_  
  
  
She awoke gently, and it was a small kindness.  
  
For a long while, she did nothing else but listen to the rhythmic sound of Stakar’s breathing, coming and going almost like the sound of the sea breaking on the shore, and even more soothing.  
  
Eventually, she moved closer to him, cupping her hand around the back of his head and touching their foreheads together. He made a small, satisfied sound in his sleep, reaching out to wrap an arm around her waist.  
  
She’d misspoken earlier.  
  
Home was wherever they were together.  
  
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Comments are love! And happy holidays! :)
> 
> Also: yes, the story of the mysteriously dying young mother and the disappearing baby is *exactly* what you think it is.

**Author's Note:**

> Caraginei is pronounced ka-ra-jin-ay in my head, but you do you.
> 
> Please leave comments! :) This fic is open to suggestions. Or just tell me what you think!


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